Donutheart (3 page)

“Whatcha got today?” he asked, expertly keeping the cigarette in place while he talked. My mother was still kneeling, rewarding the dogs with her presence and scratching them behind the ears. She looked up at him.

“Just wanted to let you know, Sarah’s first competition is in three weeks.”

“That so?”

“There will be an exhibition the week before, sort of like a dress rehearsal. I know how much she wants you to come.”

“Might have to work,” he said, concentrating now on the oil between his fingers and digging in with the rag. In addition to fixing up cars and roofing during the summer, Sarah’s father did temp work at the door-panel factory over in Marshfield.

My mother set her box of Thompson Treats on the hood of the van and waited. She wanted an answer. She wasn’t going to let Mr. Kervick off the hook. Without treats in the immediate vicinity of their noses, the dogs whined and started jumping up on my mother. Bernie tried to distract them with an empty fist held just above their heads, but that made them jump higher and paw the air.

“Get on!” Mr. Kervick growled, swiping at them with his rag.

Was it the tone of his voice or the threat of a swat that drove them to run, ears back, tails tucked between their legs, into the shed where Mr. Kervick kept his tools?

My mother folded her arms. So much for positive rewards.

“Back in the car, Bern.” After Bernie had slammed the door, she continued: “Well, I’ll have her Thursday after school, getting fitted for her skating costume…and a sandwich after, if it’s all right by you.”

Mr. Kervick had a hard time setting his eyes anywhere, and—I’d observed—he had a particularly hard time looking my mother in the eye.

But now he dropped his cigarette in the dirt and stepped in closer, lowering his voice. I couldn’t make out all he said, only the snatches: “You done a lot for Sarah, her not having a ma and all…” and “…take up work with my brother over in Muskegon…”

When he finished, he seemed to be waiting for her to say something. It was as if he’d doled out so many more words than usual, my mother owed him a few back. But she didn’t answer. She just shrugged her shoulders and got back in the van, closing the door, turning the key in the ignition, and placing her hands on the steering wheel, all with the slow, controlled movements that told me my mother was trying her best not to fly off the handle.

We passed Sarah’s bus in a cloud of dust on the way to the main road.

Finally, when we were back on pavement, my mother turned to Bernie: “‘We never stay in one place long.’ That’s what he said.” She continued, imitating Mr. Kervick’s raspy voice. “‘It might do ya to remember that.’”

“I’m sorry, Julia…” Bernie had been out of conversation range, lost among the tall grass of the Jun Dun Plain. “What were you saying?”

“Was that supposed to be a threat?” she asked him.

Before I could contribute a resounding “Yes!” from the backseat, my mother twisted the volume on the radio, and we were awash in the unsafe decibel levels of her favorite classic-rock station.

CHAPTER FOUR

Marked as an Unfortunate

As if this wasn’t enough extracurricular activity for one day, my mother and I set out after dinner to run a few errands. This included picking up her work boots from the repair shop and purchasing a dress.

Paul had invited my mother to the fish fry at the Lions Club on Friday night. He wanted her to wear a dress. This doesn’t seem odd unless you know my mother. As soon as she started paying her own way, Julia Donuthead stopped wearing dresses.

“I just don’t prefer them,” she’d respond when challenged. Her willingness to buy one now told me that things with Paul were taking a very serious turn.

As soon as I got in the van, I noticed something odd suctioned to the dashboard. It looked like a test tube.

“What is this?” I asked, pointing to it.

“What is what?” My mother pulled out into traffic.

“This.” I reached over and put her hand on it.

“Oh…um, nothing.” She pulled it off the dash with a
thwock
and stuffed it in her glove compartment.
All while accelerating to forty-five miles per hour.

“I still saw it,” I said, waiting for the explanation.

“It’s a vase, all right, Detective Donuthead?”

“If it’s a vase, why doesn’t it have flowers in it?”

“I found you a community-service activity,” she announced as we turned into the parking lot of Alpine Shoe Repair.

I sighed. “Fine.” As with a number of things going on lately, no further explanation would be provided. “I thought
I
was supposed to find me a community-service job.”

After carefully considering my choices, I had decided that Sarah and I could stuff envelopes for the Land Conservancy. They had a nice renovated office on Main Street. The worst outcome I could think of was a paper cut,
and
it wouldn’t require much of Sarah’s concentration.

“I met up with Mack Putnam down at Perkins’ Drug Store, and he said Grace in the library could use some help reshelving the books. Her knees aren’t what they used to be, and the picture books are all down by the floor.”

“Are we speaking of Mrs. Boardman in the Pelican View Elementary library?”

“Right. Sorry. Mr. Putnam, your old principal, wants you to help Mrs. Boardman, your old librarian.”

“Library aide,” I corrected her. “But I can’t go back to Pelican View Elementary. I’m a sixth grader.”

We’d pulled into the department-store parking lot, and my mother unlocked the doors.

“Oh, Franklin, it’s not a hard job. It’s better than touching germy kids. There’s almost no possibility of being struck by lightning or held hostage at gunpoint. Just make my life easy for once and do it without the endless commentary, okay?”

“Well, I…” I could see she was dead serious. My mother gets very stressed out when she goes shopping. “Okay.”

“Now grit your teeth and help me find a dress.”

“Okay,” I said quietly, and I offered no commentary about the fact that while there is nothing statistically dangerous about the ladies’ section of a department store, I, too, feel uneasy when I’m in one. This may be due to bad memories of trying to keep track of my mother as she power walked through the store. Now that I could see above the racks, however, this was less of an issue.

As we headed to Misses’ Dresses, I realized the problem. Everywhere you looked, you were reminded of…well, women. Ladies’ pajamas, ladies’ workout wear, ladies’
lingerie.

I saw a man about my mother’s age looking similarly uncomfortable, pressed into one of those little chairs outside the dressing room. A woman came out in a pair of dress pants, lifted up the tails of her blouse and turned in a circle.

“How does this look from the back?” she said. “I’m going for professional. It’s an interview.”

I froze in place. Was she talking to me? This would be a difficult question to answer tactfully.

He mumbled something and I hurried along.

My mother was attacking the sale rack, pulling out one dress after the other and frowning. I began to search the next size up and pulled out a perfectly nice shirtdress in neutral brown.

“What about this?”

“Oh, please, Franklin. I don’t want to look like the lady at the license bureau. It’s a dance.”

“I thought it was a fish fry!”

“It’s a fish fry
and
a dance.”

“Is it…formal?” I asked, hoping not. If Paul had invited my mother to the prom for forty-somethings, things were even worse than they seemed.

“No.”

“Aren’t these the summer dresses?” I asked, fingering the material. “You’ll get goose bumps if you wear these in October, Mother. Goose bumps are not attractive on a woman your age. Maybe something wool…”

My mother had pulled out a black dress covered with sprays of pollen-producing wildflowers.

“You can’t wear that. It doesn’t have any sleeves.”

“Yes it does. They’re called cap sleeves.”

I eyed her suspiciously.

“Don’t look like that. We have
InStyle
in the break room at work.”

“Well…try it on then,” I urged her, against my better judgment. There was something to be said for just getting it over with.

I took my seat opposite the gentleman assigned to comment on how his wife fit into business attire.

He looked over at me and shrugged. “Tough duty, eh?”

I nodded. It was indeed.

“Tell you what, you take my wife and I’ll take your mom. That way things’ll go easier for us at home.”

At that very moment, his wife peeked out of the dressing room and proceeded to model another outfit.

“What in the Sam Hill…?”

“It’s called a ‘skort.’ It’s a cross between a skirt and shorts.” She walked farther away so that we could get a better look.

“Give me the damage,” she said, turning around.

The man across the aisle raised his eyebrows as if asking me to live up to my end of the bargain. I tried to formulate something positive, but the only phrase that came to mind was “elastic limit.” I was saved from further embarrassment by my mother’s appearance in the doorway. She walked past us
barefoot
and turned around.

The man in the opposite chair whistled softly and said to his wife, “Do they have one of those in your size?”

The woman eyed my mother critically. She tugged on the dress, went around back, and finished zipping the zipper.

“Stand up straight and own it, honey,” the woman said.

“This dress fits you like a glove.”

My mother laughed and put her hands to her face, embarrassed. She had taken her hair out of its ponytail, and it fell down around her shoulders. Her long, muscled arms were still tan. The dress, tight along her rib cage, flared out and fell in soft folds just above her ankles.

There was something about the way she laughed, like a middle-school girl, and how she kept rising up on the balls of her feet that made me realize my mother was once young herself.

“Well, Franklin?” she asked.

I said the only thing that came to mind: “You look pretty.”

Paul’s pickup was parked smack in the middle of the driveway when we got home.

“Will this day never end?” I mumbled into the door as I stepped out of the van and braced myself for a clap on the shoulder.

“Hey, babe.” Paul, who’d been sitting on the doorstep, jumped up to greet us.

“Hey. I thought you were working tonight.”

“Got off a little early.”

I studied the tips of my shoes while they kissed.

“So?” My mother unlocked the front door and held it open for us. I hurried through. In his excitement to see my mother, Paul had forgotten his usual greeting to me.

“Well, I stopped by Bert’s Surplus to get some of that baling twine for all those pallets we got out back behind the ice rink, and I picked up an item for Franklin here.”

Since he was behind me, Paul’s hand clap caught me completely by surprise. I staggered into the hallway, trying to stay upright.

“Well, isn’t that funny? Because we were out getting something for you, too.”

“At LaVeen’s?” Taking my mother’s shopping bag, Paul pressed it all over with his fingers. “No way, Franklin!”

He lifted his hand in a high-five gesture. I was discovering that this was how my mother’s boyfriend bonded with people. I braced my feet and raised my hand up and away from my body.

“You got your mother to buy a dress for the dance? Way to go!”

Slap!

“Well,” he said. “Are you going to try it on for me?”

“Not on your life, mister. You can wait.”

I bent down to remove my shoes, hoping Paul would follow my example.

“I figured.” As he pulled my mother close, I was forced to make another thorough study of my footwear.

“So what did you get Franklin?”

“Oh.” Paul pulled a handful of wool out of his jacket pocket and lobbed it at me. “Your mom told me you got the dreaded desk in Spansky’s class.”

I caught the material and stretched it out.

“Go on. Try it on.”

“What exactly is it?” I asked him.

“It’s a ski mask.”

My mother started laughing. “Oh, Paul.”

“I’m serious. It’s gonna give you maximum protection. It was Hank Niemeyer who got that desk when I was at Pelican View Middle. Him and another kid. I don’t know what happened to the other guy, but I see Hank every once in a while at the harness races and he still has a twitch.

“Try it on, Franklin,” my mother said, chewing her lip to keep from laughing.

“I prefer to wash it first,” I said, trying to imagine myself in sixth-grade science in the headgear most popular among bank robbers and terrorists.

“Yeah, that’s okay. It’s pretty much one-size-fits-all. But don’t put it in the dryer. That’s one hundred percent wool.”

Maybe I’d better explain. It has always been my habit to sit at the front of the classroom. Studies have shown that scholastic achievement is directly linked to how close you sit to the teacher. Criminal activity is far less likely to occur in the front of the classroom than at the back. So, while Sarah Kervick found a seat that was wedged between an actual skeleton and a glass case containing jars of human organs(!) in formaldehyde solution on the first day of science class, I sat at one of the gleaming black lab tables just opposite Mr. Spansky’s desk. While this proved to be the best seat possible for achieving mental improvement and risk avoidance, it was
not
the right location for health promotion.

On the first day of class, Mr. Spansky pinched the ends of his bow tie so that they stood out from his lab coat in perfect symmetry. He walked around his desk and leaned against it. He was a mere three feet away. Leaning back, he removed two pairs of safety glasses from the drawer in his desk and handed them across the lab table to me and to Bernie, who’d arrived late and taken the only seat left, which just so happened to be at my table.

At first, I was pleased, thinking that my reputation had preceded me and Mr. Spansky was trying to respect my wishes regarding risk avoidance. Bernie held up the safety glasses as if to ask,
Has this already been covered?
Since class was about to begin, I could only answer with a shrug.

We put on our safety glasses. As it turned out, just in time.

“Good morning, and welcome to my—Mr. Spansky’s—sixth-grade science class.”

Note, if you will, how many words in that sentence contain the letter
s.
As soon as his brief declaration was complete, the lab table in front of us was covered in shining bubbles of Mr. Spansky’s spit, horrifically highlighted by the table’s dark color. Extracting a spray bottle from his front pocket, Mr. Spansky quickly dispatched the mess with a spritz and a paper-towel wipe down.

Bernie and I exchanged quick glances through our violated glasses as the classroom around us broke up laughing.

“Due to a deficiency in my palate, I am unable to contain all of my saliva in my mouth when I speak. This necessitates—
squirt, squirt, rub, rub
—the use of certain antiseptic measures. I beg your understanding.”

By the time his little speech was completed, I was crouching beneath the table. Hadn’t the man lived with his disability long enough to know that words like
necessitates
should be permanently removed from his vocabulary?

Needless to say, Bernie and I had snagged the seats for the entire semester. Though Paul’s heart may have been in the right place—I’m still not entirely sure he wasn’t making fun of me—even I could see that wearing a ski mask in Mr. Spansky’s class would amount to social suicide.

So I learned to develop my own precautions. At the end of each class period, as I bent over to return my materials to my backpack, I quickly wiped my face with antibacterial wet wipes, the sort that mothers stow in their baby’s diaper bag. I also had a small Mercurochrome stick for direct hits. While using “the stick” left an orange mark, I relied on the general chaos between classes to let disinfecting occur, and then wiped it off at my locker just before lunch.

I developed my emergency hygiene plan just in time. Not long after the year began, we launched into a unit on single-celled organisms. I should note that science teachers seldom refer to the building blocks of the universe in the singular: not atom, but atom
s
; not electron, but electron
s
…proton
s,
neutron
s, s
trand
s
of DNA. But even a long speech on
s
ingle-
c
elled organi
s
m
s
could not compare to the shock I received in the cafetorium that Wednesday.