All The Ugly and Wonderful Things 21

  

 18

 

KELLEN

 

September 1990

 

Beth could nag at me all she wanted about my cholesterol, but I went back to eating bacon and eggs and pancakes with real butter like Wavy used to cook. That’s what I had for breakfast before my weekly meeting with my parole officer. Beth was at the counter packing her lunch while I ate, but she kept looking over her shoulder at me. Made me real self-conscious.

 

“What?” I said.

 

“Did you see the mail yesterday?” she said.

 

“No.” I figured somebody had stuck another flier about me in the mailbox. People still did that, even though I was careful. I never talked to kids, not for nothing. Far as I was concerned, kids didn’t exist. Which left me feeling like shit any time I saw some kid’s busted down bike. I coulda fixed it, but people mighta thought the wrong thing.

 

Beth pitched a letter on the table in front of me. The only mail I ever got was official stuff from the Department of Corrections, only this one wasn’t. It’d been years since I got a letter in that handwriting, but I knew it from back when Wavy used to send me Christmas cards from her aunt’s house.

 

“I won’t tell you again,” Beth said. “If you break your parole, you can’t live here.”

 

She went back to fixing her lunch, and I tried to finish my breakfast, but that letter had thrown me for a loop.

 

First, it meant Wavy knew I was living with Beth again. All she had to do was call the Department of Corrections and they’d give her my current address off the sex offender registry. I had to figure she thought the worst of me, because what else was she gonna think? I’d made her keep the ring, and went back to living with Beth, like the ring didn’t mean a thing to me.

 

Second, it meant Wavy had something to say to me, but what?

 

“Are you going to open it or read it through the envelope?” Beth said. It was the same voice she used to say all the mean things she said when I came back.

 

“Neither. Just throw it away. That’s what you were gonna do anyway, isn’t it?”

 

She didn’t hardly wait for me to get the words out of my mouth before she picked it up and tossed it in the trash can. After that I couldn’t get the food down my throat, and it was time to go. When I went to scrape my plate off into the trash, there was the letter staring up at me. I dumped what was left of my breakfast in on top of it.

 

My parole officer was a good guy, but busy, so I was usually in and out in under ten minutes. It started out like all the other meetings. How are you doing? How’s work? Having any troubles? Then all the sudden, he said, “Have you been in contact with Wavonna Quinn?”

 

“No. Hell, no.” First outright lie I ever told him. I broke out in a cold sweat and I couldn’t figure which made me seem guiltier: looking him in the eye or looking away. I gave him a good long stare and said, “No way. Why would you think that?”

 

“Just curious,” he said. Just curious, my ass. I thought about that letter and about how Beth was still pissed off at me. Made me wonder if she hadn’t called him. He didn’t push me on the subject, and two minutes later I was out of there.

 

I shoulda gone to work, but I didn’t.

 

I drove home, went into the apartment, and first thing, yanked the lid off the trash can. Inside was a new trash bag. It was my job to take the trash out, but Beth had done it, just so she could throw Wavy’s letter away.

 

That’s how I ended up in the garbage Dumpster, sifting through bags of trash. The day was warming up and that Dumpster stank like hell. I musta opened a dozen bags before I found Wavy’s letter, sticky with syrup. I crawled out of the Dumpster and sat down on the curb next to it. My stomach was right up under my throat, when I opened the envelope.

 

Dear Kellen,

 

 

 

I thought you would come to me after you got the letter from the court, but you didn’t. I can imagine a thousand reasons you wouldn’t come and only one reason you would, but I hoped that reason would be enough. I won’t bother you again. I’m only writing because I have something I need to return to you. Because of its size, it would be best if you could come get it. Will you meet me at my aunt’s house over Labor Day weekend? Sunday at 4? If you prefer not to see me, you can come after 5 pm. I’ll be gone by then.

 

 

 

See you soon.

 

 

 

Love,

Wavy

 

I never got any letter from the court, but there’d been a few weeks when I was moving around so much I didn’t know where I was gonna sleep, let alone where to tell my parole officer I was living. Then again, maybe it came and Beth threw it away.

 

Not knowing what was in that missing letter scared the hell outta me, because I couldn’t afford to go getting my hopes up. Whatever was in it, I had two choices. I either had to throw the letter back in the Dumpster and go to work, or I had to go upstairs and pack my stuff. There wasn’t no middle ground.

 

19

AMY

I hadn’t planned to go home for Labor Day, until Mom told me Wavy was coming.

“That’s what her letter said. The first one I’ve had from her in months,” Mom said.

Wavy hadn’t written to me since May, either, and now that she was twenty-one, I’d started to wonder if we would ever see her again. Hearing that she intended to visit was a relief, until I considered that she might be planning a showdown with my mother. The question was whether I wanted to witness it.

Mom threw the same Labor Day party every year: a Sunday lunch of daiquiris and burgers on the back patio with a few of her book club friends. Wavy didn’t show for lunch, and by four o’clock, everyone else had gone home. Mom and I were in the living room, when Wavy walked in the front door, carrying a couple of manila envelopes. She looked weary.

“You’re too late for lunch, but I’m glad you came!” Mom said.

I didn’t know what to say. Sorry I was an unwitting accomplice to my mother’s betrayal?

“Did you come down by yourself or did you bring Renee?” I was hoping for somebody else to be a buffer between Wavy and Mom.

“Meeting her boyfriend’s parents,” Wavy said.

“Oh, so she’s getting serious with a new boyfriend?” Mom said.

We managed small talk for twenty or thirty minutes, but just as I started to relax, the doorbell rang. Wavy glanced at her watch and, for a few seconds, weariness transformed into grief. Then she stood up and went to answer the door.

“What in the world?” Mom said it like she expected a pleasant surprise. When she and I got to the door, Wavy was signing something on a clipboard held by a skinny guy in a baseball cap. Behind him, a flatbed truck stood parked at the curb.

“Did you have car trouble?” I said.

“Or did you finally decide to sell that old motorcycle?” Mom’s look of triumph was wasted on Wavy, who was already backtracking through the house to open the garage door. The motorcycle stood in the corner with a bed sheet thrown over it to keep off the dust, in between visits from the mechanic.

As Wavy pulled the sheet away, the envelopes slipped out from under her arm. I bent to pick them up and found one addressed to my mother and one addressed to Kellen. His contained something small and square. A ring box. I held them out to her, but she had her hands over her eyes.

“You son of a bitch!” my mother screamed from the front yard. “You just broke the conditions of your parole! I’ll see you back in jail!”

Wavy grabbed the envelopes out of my hand and we both ran out of the garage.

Kellen stood out in the street next to an old dented pickup truck. He looked terrified, and who could blame him, with my mother shouting like that? I ran toward Mom, and I expected Wavy to go to Kellen, but she came after me.

We caught up with Mom on the front porch, as she was opening the storm door, probably going inside to call the police. Wavy reached past her and slammed the door closed.

“You lied to the parole board and you lied to me,” Wavy said through clenched teeth. She looked both angry and like she might cry.

“I was only trying—”

Before Mom could explain herself, Wavy flattened one of the manila envelopes against Mom’s chest with her open palm. “This is from the judge, to change Kellen’s parole.”

Kellen squinted up at the porch, at the three of us watching him. It dawned on me that he didn’t know why he was there. He was risking going back to jail on nothing more than Wavy’s word. He didn’t know it was the happiest day of his life.

I understood then why the reunion was happening there instead of someplace else. Not to throw it in my mother’s face, but because Mom’s house was the place where Wavy had drawn a line. The day she stood in our driveway and screamed, “Mine!” she wasn’t talking about the motorcycle.

As Mom opened the manila envelope, Wavy started down the sidewalk. Kellen crossed the street and stepped up on our curb. I expected a joyful, over-the-top romantic movie reunion, but they walked toward each slowly. They met about halfway, and she handed him the other envelope. He felt the bottom of it, where the ring box was, and shook his head. It was easy to make out the word no, but I don’t know what else he said. When Wavy spoke, I could guess what she was telling him. His answer made Wavy throw her head back and laugh.

Kellen opened the envelope and stuck his hand in. He pulled out the ring box, just as Wavy jumped up and threw her arms around his neck. The force of it staggered him back half a step, but when they kissed each other, it was a romantic movie. The sequel to that good-bye in Kellen’s shop.

I think they would have gone on kissing for a long time, but Mom stepped off the porch and shouted, “Get off my property, you bastard, or I’ll have you arrested for trespassing!”

Blushing and frowning, Kellen lowered Wavy to her feet. She took his hand and led him toward the driveway.

“If he steps foot on my property, I’ll call the police!” Mom knew Wavy couldn’t move the motorcycle by herself, and the tow truck driver seemed to take the trespassing remarks to heart. He stood by the cab of his truck watching us warily.

“I’ll help you,” I said.

Together, Wavy and I pushed the bike down the driveway. A few times I thought we were going to drop it, but we made it to the curb. Ignoring my mother’s glared threat, Kellen took it from us and rolled it into the street with a stunned look on his face.

“I wonder if it’ll even start,” he said, as he swung his leg over the bike.

I just knew it would start the first time and it did. When he twisted the throttle, the whole street echoed with the engine. Kellen grinned at Wavy, and then he seemed to remember something. He stood up and pulled the ring box out of his pocket. The ring wouldn’t go up over her middle knuckle until he ducked his head and licked her finger. He laughed as he slid the ring up.

“We gotta get that resized,” he said. He raised her hand to his mouth again and kissed the ring. I’d taken a few steps back, feeling awkward about intruding on them, but Kellen looked at me and said, “Do you really think your mom’s gonna call the cops? ’Cause technically, I am breaking my parole. I’m not supposed to cross state lines without my parole officer’s permission.”

“I don’t know,” I said. We all three turned to look at Mom, who came across the front lawn toward us, glowering. “But now might be a good time to leave.”

“Where should we have him take the bike?” Wavy gestured to the tow truck driver.

“To hell with that, sweetheart,” Kellen said. “Get on and let’s ride this thing.”

“Give me your keys and I’ll have him take your car home,” I said.

Practically glowing, Wavy handed me the keys. She hugged me so fast and hard, I didn’t even manage to hug her back.

Then she hiked her skirt up and got on the back of the bike. Laying her cheek against Kellen’s shoulder, she wrapped her arms as far around him as they would go. He gunned the bike and they rode away, leaving Mom, me, and a confused tow truck driver standing in the street.

“I want that pickup truck towed,” Mom said.

 

20

KELLEN

December 1990

We were quiet for most of the drive, with Wavy staring out the window, but when we saw the first sign for Tulsa, her shoulders tensed up.

“We don’t have to do this,” I said.

For the first time in almost two hours, Wavy looked at me. Glared at me. Times like that I was glad she didn’t talk much, because that hot look woulda come with a mean mouth.

“I just thought maybe you’d changed your mind.”

“I didn’t.” She went back to looking out the window.

I sure hadn’t changed my mind. I didn’t want to do it when she first suggested it, and I still didn’t.

The closer we got, the more nervous I got.

“I love you,” I said. I couldn’t always get a free pass with that, but she laid her hand on my leg. I put my hand on top of hers and wiggled the diamond under my thumb. A few miles later, she leaned over and rested her cheek on my arm. Her stomach growled.

“Did you eat anything?” These days she could actually sit down and eat at the table, but last night, she couldn’t get any dinner down. No breakfast either, that I saw.

“Too nervous,” she said.

But she still wanted to do it. The harder a thing was, the more likely she’d be able to do it. I couldn’t hardly believe what she’d done to get me back.

With her holding my hand, I coulda gone on driving forever, but then there was the exit. A couple more turns, a minute waiting at the last stoplight, and we were there in less than three blocks. After I parked at the curb, I took the flask of bourbon out of the glove compartment and drained it.

“Liquid courage,” I said.

I expected Wavy to frown at me, but she leaned over and kissed my cheek. Then she reached into the backseat and shook Donal awake. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, still half asleep and surly. I felt for the kid. He wanted to be there about as much as I did.

Following Wavy up the sidewalk with the flowers in my right hand and the bottle of wine in my left, I felt like an asshole making her go first. She rang the bell and stood in front of me like a shield. Donal stood behind us like he wasn’t even involved. He was still working out how he fit in.

When the door swung open, it was somebody I didn’t know. A young guy with a ponytail and a pink polo shirt. He didn’t know us, either, but he let us in.

“Merry Christmas! I’m Brice Standish. I’m Leslie’s husband,” he said.

“Who is it, Bri—?” Leslie came into the hallway and stared. I hadn’t seen her since she was a teenager, but grown up, she was narrower in the face, more like Val than Brenda.

“Hey, Leslie,” I said.

Then Amy walked in and said, “You came.”

She headed straight to me and I thought she was just going to take the wine, but after she had it out of my hand, she put her arms around me. Surprised the hell out of me. I knew Amy didn’t hate my guts the way Brenda did, but I hadn’t figured any of the Newlings would be happy to see me. Wavy had her fingers hooked into my belt loop, and she didn’t let go when Amy added her to the hug, so it was the three of us holding onto each other, which was weird but good. That’s how we were when the storm door opened behind us.

Where my hand was on Amy’s back, I knew the second she saw Donal. She shivered and took a step back from me and Wavy. Then one of her hands came up over her mouth.

“Donal,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Donal.” That was Leslie, and she looked like she was gonna cry.

Amy tried to hug him, but he was all bristly teenager, crossing his arms over his chest and ducking his head. He wouldn’t even say hello.

“Is everything okay, Leslie?” Brice said.

“It’s fine. These are my cousins, Wavy and Donal Quinn. And this is, uh…”

“Jesse Joe Kellen,” I said.

Still smiling, Brice stuck his hand out to me. I shifted the flowers and we shook.

“Not Barfoot?” Leslie said.

“Nope. The judge changed it. It’s Kellen. Now, Brice, you better step back,” I said, as I let go of his hand.

“Why’s that?”

“You don’t wanna be standing too close to me when your mother-in-law realizes I’m here. Maybe she’ll just call the cops, but there’s a good chance she’ll try to kill me. Either way, you don’t wanna get caught in the crossfire.” Like always, my nerves kept me talking.

Brice laughed like it was a good joke, but Leslie gave me a nervous smile.

“The flowers are gorgeous. Let’s put them in the dining room in the good crystal vases,” she said.

Vah-zes. Turned out they were fancy glass, and too small for the flowers, so I used my pocket knife to cut down the stems.

“It’s like Hell’s Angels Floral Arrangements,” Brice said, staring at the tattoos on my arms while I messed with the flowers.

A mistake, wearing a T-shirt, except that Wavy liked to see her name running down the inside of my forearm in three-inch letters.

“I wasn’t ever in a gang. I pretty much managed to get into trouble all on my own,” I said.

“Who was at the door?” Brenda Newling walked into the dining room, drying her hands on her apron. Behind her was a tall redheaded woman I didn’t know. Right when I needed it, the bourbon kicked in.

“Hey, Brenda. It being Christmas and all, will you at least give me a head start before you call the cops?”

 

21

AMY

He actually called my mother Brenda. I waited for Armageddon, while Mom gaped at her prodigal niece and the much-maligned and long-reviled Jesse Joe Kellen. A flush crept up his cheeks, as he folded his knife and put it in his pocket. We were all holding our breaths, expecting a scene, but then Mom saw Donal.

I sympathized with the shock in her face. At fourteen, he was taller than Wavy and even thinner. Everything about him was defensive, his shoulders hunched inside a gray hooded sweatshirt, and his hands jammed in the pockets. He may have been Sean’s son, but he looked so much like Liam I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I can only imagine what Wavy felt when she looked at him. Like seeing a hybrid of someone you love and someone you hate.

In the awkward silence, I could see Mom trying to feel a bunch of things at once—anger, annoyance, relief, and then—when she looked at Donal—love and guilt. However he’d been brought back to us, we were all at fault for how he was lost.

Mom came around the table and tried to hug him, but he backpedaled, scowling. I think he might have escaped out the front door, except that Kellen laid a hand on his shoulder and kept him there.

“You’re just in time! Dinner’s ready!” Trisha said. She stood there looking beautiful and welcoming. I was so glad I’d invited her.

“I’ll put more place settings out,” Leslie said.

She added three more places to the table, while Trisha and I got kitchen chairs to make up enough seats at the dining room table. Then we started carrying in the food. When I brought out the ham, Trisha was shaking Kellen’s hand.

“Hey, Trisha. Good to meet you,” he said.

“I’m Amy’s roommate,” she said.

My roommate. Hearing that stopped me cold, because I remembered that drunken night in high school when Wavy had tried to comfort me. “Nothing left to be afraid of,” she’d said. Even if that wasn’t true, I wanted to live like it was. I wished that I had introduced Trisha properly to Mom and Leslie, but all I could do was correct the mistake.

“Actually,” I said. “Trisha is my girlfriend.”

Trisha’s mouth dropped open for a second, and Leslie snapped her head around to look at me. Like a reward for my bravery, Wavy reached out and shook Trisha’s hand.

In an act of diplomatic caution, Leslie put as much distance as she could between Kellen and Mom, but the result was that they sat at opposite ends of the table, facing each other. Still, it probably wasn’t much worse than most family holiday dinners. Mom was torn between glaring at Kellen and smiling tearily at Donal, who sat next to him. The rest of us tried to keep the conversation going with as much harmless chatter as we could muster. We talked a lot about the weather, and Leslie and Brice’s honeymoon to Mazatlán.

Wavy seemed different but I couldn’t tell why. She managed to eat half a dinner roll and a bite of ham that took her almost five minutes to chew and swallow. Kellen ate slowly and methodically, clearing his plate, while Donal picked at his food.

“How are you, Donal?” Mom asked over dessert. She’d asked that a couple of different ways during dinner, but all she got were mumbled responses.

“Where did you find him?” Leslie said, like it was a scavenger hunt.

I tried, “How did you find each other?” Because that was the question nagging at all of us. After seven years, how had Donal come to be sitting at our table for Christmas dinner?

“My parole officer knows this private detective,” Kellen said. “Got him to look through juvenile records in a couple states. He found Donal out in California.”

“What about Sean? Where is he?” Mom looked at Wavy when she said it, even though the answer was likely going to come from Kellen.

At the mention of Sean, Donal stood up from the table, sending his fork and his napkin tumbling onto the floor. He shoved his chair back and stomped out into the entry. A moment later the front door slammed.

Kellen picked up the fork and napkin, while Wavy whispered something to him. He and Mom stood up at the same time. He followed Donal out the door, while she headed toward the front windows. Part of me wanted to give them some privacy, but it wasn’t the strongest part. I peeked out the edge of the curtain.

Donal and Kellen stood on the front walk, just about where Wavy and Kellen had been reunited earlier in the year. Donal was hunkered down against the cold, while Kellen leaned over him, talking. Donal nodded. Kellen took out his wallet and handed Donal some money. Then he pulled something out of his front pocket and palmed it to Donal, while giving him a rough pat on the shoulder. As Kellen came back up the sidewalk to the house, Donal got into their car, started it, and drove away.

I tensed, waiting for the inevitable explosion. As soon as Kellen stepped into the dining room, my mother said, “What are you thinking? He’s not old enough to drive!”

“Yeah, well, he’s not old enough for a lot of the shit he’s been through,” Kellen said.

“You cannot be serious. You cannot be serious,” Mom said, even though he obviously was. “And what if he gets pulled over? What then?”

“He won’t get pulled over. He’s a decent driver, and dollars to donuts he’s just gonna go up the road to the gas station and buy a pop or something.”

“We have some pop here,” Leslie said.

“He don’t need anything to drink. He needs to get some fresh air.”

“He is only fourteen!” Mom said.

Kellen clenched his jaw, and I could see that under all his jokes about my mother’s anger, he was carrying a grudge. I imagine six years in prison will do that.

“What do you want from the kid? What the hell do you want? You think this is easy for him? Coming back here after all these years and seeing his family and not knowing what to say or how to act. It’s fucking hard, okay? It’s hard for him.”

That shut Mom up for a few minutes. Kellen dropped back into his chair with a thud. He snapped his napkin across his lap and picked up his fork. We were all quiet while he chewed an enormous bite of pie.

“So is Donal living with you?” I said.

Wavy nodded.

“Since November,” Kellen said. It looked to me like it wasn’t easy for him, either.

“What happened? I mean with his uncle—your uncle? Sean?” The whole conversation was a minefield.

“He’s dead,” Wavy said. Kellen looked at her and she shrugged.

“He died of a heroin overdose, more than two years ago. Donal went into foster care after that and then ended up in juvie.”

“Juvie?” Leslie said. “Like jail?”

Kellen sighed and set his fork down. “Yeah. He had some trouble on a breaking and entering charge. Nothing serious. The kinda shit kids get into at that age. We hired a lawyer to get us through family court. Good guy, did okay by us. You know, I had to have my parole transferred down here, and then I can’t live with anybody under sixteen because of the sex offender thing. But the lawyer got us an exception for Donal, since he’s my brother-in-law.”

“Wow,” I said. It was like getting important news from a telegram: Sean dead, Donal in jail, Kellen and Wavy married. Stop.

“That’s great that he could come live with you,” Trisha said. She and Brice were both trying not to look stunned by their crash course in Wavy’s life.

“Yeah, it’s really great.” Leslie jumped in late, but she made up for the delay by nodding vigorously. “So how is he?”

“He’s doing better. But like I said, it’s hard for him.”

I waited for Mom to say something that would show she was happy, but she sat there looking like she’d been slapped. Despite all her efforts to keep them apart, Wavy and Kellen were together. I felt sorry for Wavy, because we were the only family she had. Kellen and Donal and us. She hadn’t come to rub my mother’s nose in it. She’d come to make up with Mom.

“So when did you get married?” I said.

“She didn’t tell you?” The heavy crease between Kellen’s eyes smoothed out and he smiled. “I thought you told her, sweetheart. Day after we got the bike, we rode down to Vegas and got married. Her roommate, Renee, and her boyfriend followed us down in the car, in case we had any troubles with the bike, but everything was dandy.”

“The postcard. I didn’t realize that was—congratulations!” I’d received a postcard of the Las Vegas strip, but all she’d written on the back was “Thank you,” signed with a W and a heart.

“Was that fun?” Leslie said.

“It was a whole lot of noise and people, and we were tired when we got there, but you know, we had a great ride, and we didn’t have to wait three days for a marriage license.”

“Impatient.” Wavy gave Kellen a sly look that made him grin.

“Hell, we was engaged for eight years. I’d say I was plenty patient.”

Wavy laughed. Mom scowled at her plate.

“We talked about eloping, but Leslie wanted to do the big ceremony,” Brice said.

“What was it like? You didn’t have an Elvis impersonator, did you?” Leslie said.

Mom stood up, like you would at a wedding reception to make a toast, and I thought she would finally say something to make Wavy feel welcome. All she did was put her salad and dessert plates on top of her dinner plate and gather up her silverware.

“You cooked it, Brenda. We can clear it off,” Kellen said.

She let him take the plates out of her hands. While he carried her dishes to the kitchen, the conversation was dead. Mom sat down, but without a plate to glare at, she finally looked at Wavy.

I wondered if she was doing the same thing I was doing, trying to figure out what was different about Wavy. There was something different. Not just that when Kellen came back to the table and ran his finger across his pie plate, Wavy opened her mouth and let him stick the whipped cream in. Something passed between them and he frowned.

“Oh, sweetheart, are you sure you wanna do this right now?” he said.

“Before Donal comes back.”

“Fair enough.”

Wavy took a deep breath and said, “Sean killed Val and Liam.”

Aunt Val had been dead for seven years, but finding out who killed her turned it into a fresh wound. Leslie cried. I cried. Mom fell apart. Everyone else sat there quietly, waiting for it to be over.

Finally, Leslie wiped her eyes and said, “Do the police know?”

Kellen reached for his wallet, chain rattling, and pulled out a folded sheet of notebook paper. With a worried look on his face he smoothed the paper on the table.

“No, we haven’t told the police nothing. I don’t think Donal’s ready for that. He hasn’t exactly been making friends with the cops lately. He wrote this to Wavy, while he was still in juvie, right after we found out where he was. They sent a whole lot of letters while we were trying to get the custody stuff figured out. The first half is about Sean, about the situation. Look, I don’t wanna say nothing rude. I don’t know if I—”

“Just say it,” Mom said.

“The first part is just about, you know, Sean being Donal’s father.”

Kellen wasn’t a fast reader, and he seemed worried about saying the wrong thing. I thought of offering to read it, but it was Wavy’s letter and she’d given it to him.

“That day, when you dropped Donal off at the ranch, he says he went up to the farmhouse and Liam’s bike was there and Val’s car. Donal says, ‘I could hear him yelling.’ Sean, he means. ‘You said you loved me. You promised, you bitch.’ Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“‘And Mama was screaming, You killed him! She was crying and I was too scared to go in, because they were yelling the way Liam did. You know, how he would get crazy. I wanted to run away, but I was scared to leave Mama there.’”

Wavy stared through the dining room wall, but the rest of us watched Kellen, who put his hand over his eyes for a moment. When he went back to reading, his voice was raw.

“‘Mama was saying, No! No! And then I heard the gun. After that, it was quiet for a while. So I opened the door and saw Mama. She was on the floor with the gun in her hand, but Sean was standing over her. He told me what to say to the cops. To tell them I was alone, that nobody else was there. He made me say it over and over, so I wouldn’t screw it up. Sean said if I told anybody he was there, something bad would happen to you. That’s why I went back to the house after Sean left and took the gun. I went—”

Kellen stopped. Mom was crying again. Wavy squeezed Kellen’s arm and he said, “I don’t wanna read that part.”

“Yes,” Wavy said.

“No, sweetheart, I really don’t.”

“Please.”

After almost every sentence, I thought Kellen would cry, but he made it to the end of the letter.

“Donal says, ‘I went to the garage and I saw you and Kellen together. I’m sorry about spying on you, but I was so scared. I needed to know you were okay. If you were with Kellen, I knew you were safe. Except the cops said … he—he raped you. Maybe that was my fault, because I told the cops that I saw you on the desk in the office with him. And then after Kellen got arrested, it wasn’t safe to tell anybody. Sean always said something bad could happen to you. I didn’t know what he might do, if Kellen wasn’t there to protect you. Now that Sean’s dead, I guess I can tell you. I hope you’re really coming to visit me like your letter says. Since you’re my sister, they say I can have a contact visit with you. See you soon. Love, Donal.’”

Kellen picked up his napkin and blew his nose. He sat with his head down, until Wavy stood up and leaned over him. When he raised his head, she held his face in her hands and kissed him.

She glanced at Mom and, for a good minute, all they did was look at each other. Mom had tears running down her face, but Wavy was smiling.

“You wanted to protect me. I know. We’re going to be okay.”

“I’m glad,” Mom whispered. She actually sounded it.

The front door snapped open and Donal skulked into the dining room holding a Styrofoam cup. Fumbling in one of his sweatshirt pockets, he pulled out a handful of crumpled bills and the car keys. When he laid them on the table next to Kellen’s plate, a few coins rolled loose and fell on the floor.

“Oh jeez,” he said, seeing us all looking weepy.

“It’s okay. I think we’re done crying,” I said.

Donal reached out and laid his hand on the back of Wavy’s neck.

“Icy paws,” she said and swatted him away. For a second he cracked a smile.

Then she picked up her plate and carried it out to the kitchen. Kellen followed her with the ham platter, and Donal trailed after them.

When I took what was left of the pie into the kitchen, the three of them were standing at the sink. Donal and Wavy were both eating off her plate and Kellen was washing dishes. Seeing them next to each other, I figured out what was different about Wavy. The top of her head almost reached Kellen’s armpit. She had grown.