someone had cut his face out of the picture so all there was left was a round hole. I stuck my finger through the hole and was wiggling it around. When Mom found me with the paper and photos all scattered on the floor, she was not happy. She took the box and the rest of it away, and I have never seen any of it again.
Wherever that box is, it is all that is left of my momâs life before Dad.
Most of the stuff in this house belonged to my ghost grandparents. The kitchen stove, the teakettle, the frying pan, the table and chairs. It isnât like they are precious heirlooms. They are beat-up pieces of junk, but they work. Until something is broken beyond repair, my dad doesnât see the point in making any kind of change.
That, right there, could be the formula of my parentsâ mysterious romance: random motion + the inertia of rest = True Love.
. . .
Fate has a mean streak. A girl gets in a car full of less-than-perfect strangers, crosses the mighty Mississippi, drives through the night past places where wagon trains stopped to bury people killed by fevers and stupid mistakes. She makes it past the first pile of mountains and, for no really good reason, decides she doesnât want to go to Seattle after all. She sticks out her thumb. A lonely guy in a pickup pulls over. She climbs in. Then, all of a sudden, two rotten, cracked little bits of DNA are just that close to each other. Two rotten, cracked little bits of DNA waiting for their chance.
I was lucky. Asta wasnât.
There was this little window of time after Asta died when things were going to be OK. Things were different, but it wasnât all bad. I went to grief counseling at the clinic. I had more free time after school.
Things werenât perfect. Dad stopped reading at night. Mom and Dad argued about how to get rid of the equipment we didnât need anymore like the wheelchair and the hospital crib. Sell it, throw it in the dump, keep it forever, give it awayâI donât even know what they decided to do. I wasnât part of the conversation.
I was having this exciting new life as a normal person. Or trying to. I wasnât off to a flying start.
To be honest, I stumbled before I got started. Iâm kind of bad at normal.
There were a couple of things holding me back. First, I wasnât exactly sure what kind of normal I wanted to be.
I could try to be normal like the other kids who ride Bus 32 are normal. I could just join the herd. It wouldnât be hard to blend in. I know the local customs. After all, I had years to learn them. I had been 33.33 percent of my class for nine years, counting kindergarten. Reba and Esther were the other 66.66 percent. But now I was a little less than 0.5 percent of my freshman class. It wasnât like the good old days in grade school where there was only one toilet and if the seat was warm when you sat down, it was a sure thing that you knew the name of the person whose rump warmed it up.
Nope. It was a big school. There were a lot of toilets and many ways of life to choose.
Reba, for example, chose a tech-ed track.
This was only partly because she likes to be around guys and there are a lot of guys who do tech-ed. Boys are not Rebaâs first love. Driving is her first love. She learned to drive while bumping around a field in an old truck when she was so little that she had to hang onto the steering wheel like a kitten while she stretched to reach the pedals with her tiptoes. The damn truck always stalled when she had to shift gears. I know this because she took me for rides when I spent the night at her house. She tried to teach me how to be her gear shifter, but I was hopeless. I picked up a lot of new vocabulary from Rebaâthe kind of words that are useful when dealing with trucks that stall and friends that canât shift gears.
She still likes driving as much as she did when she was five, and she has a talent for understanding engines. The summer after she
Wherever that box is, it is all that is left of my momâs life before Dad.
Most of the stuff in this house belonged to my ghost grandparents. The kitchen stove, the teakettle, the frying pan, the table and chairs. It isnât like they are precious heirlooms. They are beat-up pieces of junk, but they work. Until something is broken beyond repair, my dad doesnât see the point in making any kind of change.
That, right there, could be the formula of my parentsâ mysterious romance: random motion + the inertia of rest = True Love.
. . .
Fate has a mean streak. A girl gets in a car full of less-than-perfect strangers, crosses the mighty Mississippi, drives through the night past places where wagon trains stopped to bury people killed by fevers and stupid mistakes. She makes it past the first pile of mountains and, for no really good reason, decides she doesnât want to go to Seattle after all. She sticks out her thumb. A lonely guy in a pickup pulls over. She climbs in. Then, all of a sudden, two rotten, cracked little bits of DNA are just that close to each other. Two rotten, cracked little bits of DNA waiting for their chance.
I was lucky. Asta wasnât.
There was this little window of time after Asta died when things were going to be OK. Things were different, but it wasnât all bad. I went to grief counseling at the clinic. I had more free time after school.
Things werenât perfect. Dad stopped reading at night. Mom and Dad argued about how to get rid of the equipment we didnât need anymore like the wheelchair and the hospital crib. Sell it, throw it in the dump, keep it forever, give it awayâI donât even know what they decided to do. I wasnât part of the conversation.
I was having this exciting new life as a normal person. Or trying to. I wasnât off to a flying start.
To be honest, I stumbled before I got started. Iâm kind of bad at normal.
There were a couple of things holding me back. First, I wasnât exactly sure what kind of normal I wanted to be.
I could try to be normal like the other kids who ride Bus 32 are normal. I could just join the herd. It wouldnât be hard to blend in. I know the local customs. After all, I had years to learn them. I had been 33.33 percent of my class for nine years, counting kindergarten. Reba and Esther were the other 66.66 percent. But now I was a little less than 0.5 percent of my freshman class. It wasnât like the good old days in grade school where there was only one toilet and if the seat was warm when you sat down, it was a sure thing that you knew the name of the person whose rump warmed it up.
Nope. It was a big school. There were a lot of toilets and many ways of life to choose.
Reba, for example, chose a tech-ed track.
This was only partly because she likes to be around guys and there are a lot of guys who do tech-ed. Boys are not Rebaâs first love. Driving is her first love. She learned to drive while bumping around a field in an old truck when she was so little that she had to hang onto the steering wheel like a kitten while she stretched to reach the pedals with her tiptoes. The damn truck always stalled when she had to shift gears. I know this because she took me for rides when I spent the night at her house. She tried to teach me how to be her gear shifter, but I was hopeless. I picked up a lot of new vocabulary from Rebaâthe kind of words that are useful when dealing with trucks that stall and friends that canât shift gears.
She still likes driving as much as she did when she was five, and she has a talent for understanding engines. The summer after she
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