All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (35 page)

I was an exhausted, hungry wreck. I sat at my desk, sobbing and rummaging in the drawers for anything to eat to make me feel better. Wavy got out of bed in her nightgown, took her student ID card off her desk and motioned for me to follow her. She could be so bossy.

Downstairs, the corridor to the cafeteria was closed at night by a big steel door, which Wavy unlocked in ten seconds of fiddling around with her ID card. She unlocked the door to the kitchen the same way. Inside it was dark except for the emergency exit signs glowing red like Hell, until Wavy opened the giant cooler. In the halo of its blue, misty light, she laid out food for me. Quart boxes of strawberries. A vat of chocolate pudding. An entire tray filled with little squares of lemon cake. A five-gallon bucket of rocky road ice cream and a can of whipped cream.

That's my idea of a friend.

 

2

WAVY

November 1988

Renee liked to take quizzes out of women's magazines. They were silly, but good for the same thing knitting was good for. The quizzes helped Renee empty her heart, and she filled it so quickly with the wrong things, it was no wonder she needed to empty it. Lying on our beds on Sunday nights, Renee read the quizzes out loud, and I wrote down our answers.

What's Your Romance Style
? Renee was the
Bubbly Butterfly
. Flirty but fickle, quick to seal the deal and move on. My score didn't fit any of the categories, so Renee invented a new one:
Wallflower Nymphomaniac
.

“I don't even understand how you could get engaged without having some kind of conversation. Did he just say, ‘Do you want to marry me?' and you nodded?”

I nodded and Renee laughed. I looked up at Kellen's picture, which traveled back and forth between my nightstand and my desk drawer, depending on my mood. When my heart hurt too much, I hid it in the drawer. I got out of bed and picked up the picture, intending to put it away.

Renee stopped laughing and took the picture out of my hand.

“That is one seriously beefy hunk of man,” she said to tease me.

I snorted and let her put the picture back on my nightstand. Another night before I put it away.

What I missed most about Kellen wasn't riding behind him on the Panhead. I missed watching him eat. Renee ate in darting little bites and without chewing enough. The same way she filled her heart. Too quickly, and with too much talking and not enough feeling.

Our second year as roommates, I went home with Renee at Thanksgiving, and found out why she ate that way. The Dales lived in a neighborhood full of mansions with wrought iron gates and front lawns like public parks. They were rich, but they ate so desperately, they might as well have been stealing food from a stranger's garbage. Even I didn't eat like that anymore.

Mrs. Dale heaped everyone's plate up with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and gravy. After that, pie and whipped cream. I admired the generosity of all that food. I managed to eat a few bites of turkey and some pieces of buttered dinner roll for the Dales. Small, precise things that I could put in my mouth with people watching. The mashed potatoes were yellow with butter, but they were too complicated. They reminded me of rules I was trying to forget.

“You're not hungry, little girl?” Renee's grandfather said.

“It's okay, Dad.” Mrs. Dale gave me a big fake smile. Renee had warned her about me.

“So are you still dating the boy you told us about? Richard?” Mr. Dale said.

“No. Not anymore,” Renee muttered. There was no boy. Richard was the German professor who made Renee's heart burn so hot.

“Why didn't you tell me you broke up with him, sweetie?” Mrs. Dale put another slice of pie on Renee's plate and suffocated it in whipped cream.

Renee glared at the pie and pushed a nervous bite of it into her mouth, frowning as she chewed.

“Well, what happened?” Mrs. Dale said.

“You know, Wavy's engaged,” Renee said.

“Really? What does your fiancé do? Is he a student, too?” Mr. Dale raised an eyebrow at his wife.

“He's in prison,” Renee said.

Mr. Dale almost choked on a bite of pie. In the quiet that came after, I prepared myself to nod, to make the answer I always made. W
hatever you want to be true, it is
.

Renee barked a nervous laugh and said, “God, I'm kidding. I'm kidding! Wavy doesn't have a fiancé in prison.”

“Oh, Renee! You and your jokes,” Mrs. Dale said. Everyone laughed. “So, are you still going to the gym? How's your diet going?”

The fork fell out of Renee's hand and clattered onto the plate next to the half-eaten pie. Renee looked like she was going to gag, but she swallowed. I felt so angry I had to dig my nails into my hands. All that delicious food spoiled in Renee's stomach. Mrs. Dale was as dangerous as Val. She might as well have put her fingers in Renee's mouth and pulled the pie out. She might as well have shouted, “Don't eat that! That's dirty!”

*   *   *

For Kellen's Christmas letter, I devoted a paragraph to mashed potatoes, and another to the reliable deliciousness of cold pizza. Renee and I always split a pizza on Sunday nights when the cafeteria was closed. She ate her half when it got there, hot enough to burn the roof of her mouth. I ate mine after it was cold, while Renee was asleep.

I wrote to Kellen about how I wanted to cook for him and watch him eat. He approached food the same way he approached kissing: slowly, thoroughly, and with concentration. Watching him chew and swallow was lovely. Solid muscles working, sending food to fuel all of him.

Since all my letters came back unread, I mostly wrote them for myself. For the pleasure of writing, “Dear Kellen, Tonight was the first night I could see Orion, and I wished you were here, wearing his belt. If we could travel to Alpha Centauri and look at our stars, the Sun would be part of Cassiopeia. From Earth they seem so far apart, but from Alpha Centauri, our Sun is the sixth star, as close as the others.”

Kellen and I were like that. At night I thought of him in his cell, two hundred and thirty-seven miles away, according to my car's odometer. Viewed from my bed, he was a distant constellation. From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.

 

3

RENEE

April 1989

Wavy wrote more letters than anyone I knew. Every week she wrote to her cousins and her aunt. Twice a month to her high school Spanish teacher. In Spanish. She also wrote letters to the lawyer who oversaw her trust fund. Her typewriter was electric, but she pounded on it like a manual when she wrote to her lawyer, because she and her aunt were at war over Kellen's money.

Brenda used the trust to control Wavy, and that included forcing her to live in the dorm. If we wanted to get an apartment together, Wavy had to convince the trust's lawyer to overrule her aunt. That required letters. Typing until I thought my ears would bleed from the sound of it.

The winning letter mentioned “Mrs. Brenda Newling's callous indifference to my personal comfort.” That was how Wavy referred to her aunt in letters to the lawyer. Like she was a cruel stranger. It also made reference to her “special dietary needs and the difficulty of satisfying them in a communal living environment.” Another way of saying she had an eating disorder. Mostly she ate in secret and stockpiled food, but when she was really stressed out, like during finals, she ate out of the trash. Like a raccoon. Special dietary needs: other people's discarded pizza.

Wavy also wrote letters to anybody she thought could help locate her brother. She had a huge file box of correspondence from former neighbors, her uncle's old parole officer, teachers at the last school Donal attended. Years of work, starting from the moment she lost him.

Then there were letters to Kellen. She spent days writing them in beautiful penmanship on expensive paper. They all came back opened, taped back closed, and stamped UNAUTHORIZED CORRESPONDENCE.

Those letters seemed so wonderfully tragic to me. Each one a message he would never get. A note in a bottle, bobbing on the ocean. Lost.

 

4

KELLEN

June 1989

My second parole hearing was almost exactly like the first, except Old Man Cutcheon was laid up in the hospital with a heart attack. The room was too warm and Brenda Newling showed up to read a statement about how I destroyed Wavy's life. I'd nearly convinced myself Brenda kept Wavy away from the last hearing, but now she was over eighteen. If she wanted to see me, she coulda come. She didn't.

When the letter came saying I'd been granted parole, I couldn't hardly believe it, but two weeks later I was free. Or as free as I could be in a halfway house with other ex-cons, checking in with my parole officer every week. I wasn't allowed to live near a school or a daycare, so when I moved out of the halfway house, it was hard to find a place to live. And I had to file my address with the sex offender registry.

Getting a job wasn't easy, either. Old Man Cutcheon ended up closing the shop, and it wasn't like anybody else in Powell was gonna hire me, so I got paroled to Wellburg, which was bigger than Garringer, almost a hundred-thousand people.

The quick lube place was in a strip mall on the other end of town from my apartment, but it had one thing going for it: the manager didn't give me a hard time about my conviction.

Gary was my age, maybe a little older, and bald. He looked at my application and said, “The felony, I have to ask.”

“I dated this girl who was fourteen. Her aunt caught us fooling around. I pled guilty, so the girl wouldn't have to testify. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not a child molester. It was this one stupid thing I did. I don't drink. I don't do drugs. I won't steal stuff. I'll show up on time. I'm good with about anything mechanical.”

I kept talking, waiting for the hammer to fall, but Gary rubbed his head and said, “Jeez, a felony charge seems like a raw deal if the girl was willing.”

“I didn't rape her. I just messed up.”

I got the job. It was more like a factory than a garage, just changing the oil in one car after another. Mindless work, which was good.

Four months after my parole, I was living in this damp basement apartment in an old boardinghouse. The sex offender registry, it was only supposed to protect other people from me. While I was living in that apartment, I had the tires on my truck slashed and somebody spray painted PEDAFILE on my door. I moved to a different building, farther away from the nearest school, but spitting distance from the train yard. For a few weeks, there was no trouble, but then somebody put up fliers to let people know a sex offender was living in the building.

A couple nights later, these two young guys stopped me coming up the alley.

“If you showed up dead, I bet the cops wouldn't even care,” said the one who hung back behind his friend. He wore a gold cross on a chain.

“They might even give us a medal if we took care of you, you fucking scumbag.” The braver one jabbed me in the chest with his finger. No big deal, but eventually somebody was gonna try something serious.

That's what was getting ready to happen the night I met Beth.

I closed the shop some nights, which was more money, but it meant I didn't get home until after dark. Being out wasn't all that different from being in prison. I had to be on my guard all the time, especially since somebody put up those fliers about me.

So I wasn't surprised when those same two douchebags came at me in the alley.

“I don't think you got the message last time,” said the one with the cross necklace.

“We don't want your kind around here,” the brave one said.

They musta figured two against one gave them an advantage. They didn't know I could take two guys easy when I was sober. Drunk, I could take ten. When they rushed me, I didn't demolish them like when I used to get in bar fights. I coulda put them in the hospital, but I didn't want to end up back in jail, so I took a lot more punches than I gave.

“Hey! Back off, you assholes! I already called the cops!” somebody yelled behind me.

That was enough to send the two douchebags running. As I was leaning up against the side of a trash Dumpster, trying to catch my breath, this woman walked up to me. She kept one hand in her purse, I'm guessing on a can of mace.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Yeah, thanks. Did you really call the cops?”

“No, not really.”

I figured she'd go back the way she'd come, but she stayed there.

“You sure you're alright?” she said.

“Yeah, thanks. Have a good night.”

After that, I decided breaking parole was better than getting worked over. So the next day, I bought me a baseball bat.

A couple weeks later, going out to my truck, I passed the woman who saved my ass. I was gonna pretend I didn't recognize her, but she stopped me.

“Hey, Babe Ruth. You have any more trouble with those guys?” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Looks like you're ready for them, though. I'm Beth.” She held out her hand to shake. I guess she didn't see the fliers.

“Jesse Joe.”

“You're a mechanic?” She looked at my uniform shirt with my name embroidered on one side and the name of the shop on the other. “Would you mind giving me a hand with my car?”

I did it, even though it made me twenty minutes late to work. After all, I owed her one. That was my answer when she offered to cook me dinner as payment for fixing her car. We were even.

“No, come over at about seven and I'll feed you.”

A month after that first dinner, I moved in with Beth. It made money sense for us to share her apartment. The night I moved in was the first time we had sex. We both got about half drunk, she told me what to do, and I did it. A lot less awkward than me trying to figure out what to do. I guess it made both of us feel less lonely for a while.