Catalyst

  I pour two glasses of orange juice and set one in front of my brother, sitting at the kitchen table. “Do you want some juice?” I ask Teri as I stick a piece of bread in the toaster.

  “I hate juice,” she says.

  “What about Mikey?”

  “He only drinks grape juice.”

  “Sorry, we don’t have any.”

  “Figures.”

  I keep my lips pressed together until my toast springs up. “What does he like to eat for breakfast?”

  “Cereal.”

  “That’s all gone,” Toby points out.

  I spread a thin layer of butter on my toast. “How about eggs?”

  “He hates eggs.”

  “Toast?”

  Teri pulls fifty paper towels off the roll. “We only eat cereal for breakfast. Or oatmeal, if it’s cold outside.” She glares at me, daring me to criticize oatmeal. “You need to go to the grocery store.”

  “Dad’ll go.” I look down at my wrist—no watch, duh—check the kitchen clock. “Shoot. I have to hurry.”

  “Um, Kate?” Toby’s voice cracks a little.

  “So what—we’re supposed to starve?” Teri asks.

  I open the refrigerator. “Milk, bread, stuff for salad, leftover meatloaf, bologna, cottage cheese, apples, and oranges; there’s plenty to eat.”

  Teri dries off the soles of Mikey’s feet. “I knew it. I told your father you didn’t want us here.”

  Deep-breathe, Malone. Count to ten. “I’m going upstairs to get dressed and then I am going to work. Have a nice day, Teri.”

  “Kate, listen,” Toby starts.

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to go to work.”

  I pause in the doorway and turn around. “Yes, I do. I’m scheduled all day, then I’m getting my contacts. It’s on the calendar.”

  “Um, well, Dad called your boss, before you woke up,” he says. “He said you couldn’t go in, that we had an emergency and you had to help at home.”

  “What emergency?”

  Teri smiles as Mikey leaps into her arms. “Me,” she says.

  4.1 Unstable Compound

  I know the Bible says it’s wrong to kill your dad, but the Bible says lots of things we ignore these days.

  I bang out of the back door in my pajamas and slippers and stalk around the cemetery. I am vibrating at such a high frequency that dogs are howling in Buffalo. I can’t believe he did this. He’s going to get me fired, and for what—so I can baby-sit a burned-out kleptomaniac whose brother has intestinal issues? I don’t think so.

  The Litch place is crawling with people: police, firefighters, construction workers, and a half dozen gawkers clustered in the side yard. The barn is a charred skeleton of timbers and half a wall. The house looks all right, though. It has some holes in the roof, but they are already covered with blue tarps. The back porch and half the kitchen burned away, but the rest is standing. Good. She can move out this afternoon.

  Dad is leaning against the Dumpster in the driveway, surrounded by guys in hard hats. He’s dressed for action—heavy-duty jeans, ancient boots, thick work gloves—and buzzing on adrenaline. (Rev. Malone is most alive when someone is dead, dying, or in trouble. This is item #1342 on the list of things I don’t understand about my father. )

  The wind picks up as I walk down the hill. The barn timbers shudder. Ghostly whirlwinds of ash rise and writhe over the crowd, and the people turn their faces away so they don’t breathe it in.

  I plant myself in front of my father. “Are you trying to get me fired?”

  Dad blinks. “Gentlemen, this is my daughter, Kate.”

  The hard hats make polite noises.

  “You had no right to call my boss like that.”

  He won’t look me in the eye. “We’ll talk about it later. How are our guests?”

  “Hungry. When are they leaving?”

  “Um, Pete?” Dad nods to one of the men.

  Pete pushes up his hard hat with the back of his hand. “Well, the inspector is still poking around. The roof needs patching, and the kitchen here, that’s gotta come down and be rebuilt. We got lots of water damage and smoke. But the foundation’s in great shape.”

  “Can they move back in today? After you clean it up?” I ask.

  The men shake their heads slowly.

  “A week?”

  “Well, like I said, the inspector makes the decisions. Plus your father, he has an idea about rebuilding everything.”

  The wind gusts, blowing my pajama pants against my legs and making the bones of the barn creak. Bad. Bad. It’s bad when Dad has ideas. There was the year he decided Christmas was not about gift-giving and almost started a riot at the mall. . . .

  Dad smacks his hands together and grins. “The doctors told me that Mrs. Litch needs some rest. The scare last night didn’t do her heart any good. I had a nice chat with her early this morning. I told her all about my idea and she loved it. Gave me full permission.”

  Then there was the year he told the newspapers that Easter was for fasting, not for eating chocolate. Our house got egged for that one.

  “What’s the idea?” I ask.

  “I told Mrs. Litch about the Amish.”

  The image of Teri Litch dressed as an Amish girl makes me dizzy. I grab my father’s arm. “Please, Dad.”

  He pats my hand and grins wider. “The Amish can build an entire barn in a day. We can do something like that if we just pull together. The church is going to provide volunteers and the money to fix up the Litch house. It’s faith in action, my friends, faith in action!”

  The guys in hard hats squirm as if they have an itch they can’t reach. People would like my dad better if he weren’t always bringing up the religion thing.

  I pull my hands away. “Okay, that’s great, but how long does Teri have to stay with us?”

  “It depends on what we find inside,” Pete says. “Weeks. Months, maybe.”

  Before I can scream or bash my head against the Dumpster, one of the hard hats hollers toward the house. “Hey! You can’t go in there!”

  Teri Litch is about to blow. With Mikey riding on her back, she strides onto the side porch and rips down the yellow caution tape strung across the door. Mikey giggles. The barn shivers.

  Two cops join her on the porch. Teri sets down Mikey and faces them with her fists clenched.

  “Do something, Dad,” I say.

  As my father sprints over to play peace negotiator, Teri lets fly with an astounding collection of profanity, delivered at full volume. To paraphrase: “Get out of my way, you adjective noun. This is my multiple adjective house, and none of you plural noun belong here.” She points at the volunteers staring at her. (More paraphrasing here.) “I want you to arrest these adverb, adverb, truly rude gerund mothers. They’re trespassing. Get them out!”

  My father speaks to her in a low voice. I doubt he’s cursing. I must admit there is a part of me that would give anything to be able to swear like that in front of a group of strangers.

  Mikey toddles down the porch steps. Teri interrupts my father to scream at me. “Dammit, Kate, get him!”

  Everybody in this soap-opera trailer-park nightmare turns to look at me. I stumble after Mikey (it was a bad idea to come down here in slippers), scoop him up, and sniff cautiously. He smells like dishwashing detergent. He leans back in my arms and gives me the once-over. “I’m Kate,” I say. “Can you say ‘Kate’?”

  “Twuck,” Mikey says, showing me the dump truck in his hand.

  “Kate.” I point to myself.

  “Twuck.” He shoves the truck in my face.

  “Close enough.”

  Mikey and I sit down on the grass, far away from the remains of the barn. The way the wind is blowing, it’s going to come down soon. Dad must have achieved détente. He follows Teri inside the house, accompanied by a police officer.

  Mikey runs his truck over the grass and my slipper. What the hell am I doing here, having an out-of-body experience? I should be shopping f
or a microwave for my dorm room, or talking to Sara, or at the very least earning some cash so I can pay for my books and . . . “No, no, don’t eat that!” I pull Mikey into my lap and clean the grass out of his mouth. “Yucky, uck.”

  “Uck,” he repeats.

  “Precisely. A category-three uck.”

  “Free.” He scrunches up his face and wipes his tongue.

  “How did you get so cute?” Teri dressed him in overalls and a red flannel shirt that belonged to Toby when he was a rugrat. I need to distract him. “Come here, I’ll teach you something.” I set him in front of me and pull his palms together. “It’s like patty-cake, only better because it has chemistry.”

  “Uck.”

  “No, not uck. Give it a shot. You’ll love it.” I clap his hands in mine and sing, “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium . . . ”

  The boy is not so sure about this. The Litches have neglected his education.

  “No, wait. It gets better. And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium . . . hey, what are you doing?”

  “Uck.” Mikey pulls his hands away, stands up. “Up.” He stretches his arms over his head.

  I pick him up and settle him on my hip. He rests his head against my shoulder, thumb in his mouth. I sway back and forth. What does he think about all this? His mom gone, his sister . . . well, I guess he’s used to her. Maybe Mikey could stay with us for a while. He could go to the preschool at church. Dad obviously likes him. He could stay with us while Mrs. Litch gets her life back together. Between the three of us, we could take care of him, just for a while.

  Teri comes out of the house carrying a black garbage bag and a basket of toys. Mikey scrambles out of my arms and runs to her. Dad follows with another bag. A teddy bear pokes out the top of it. The cop refastens the the yellow caution tape across the door.

  Teri puts the toy basket on the ground for Mikey.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask.

  “Kind of.” The wind grabs her hair and tangles it.

  Dad sets down his bag. “I explained the situation. Mrs. Litch hadn’t had the chance to tell Teri about this. I assumed she had. My fault.”

  Teri picks up the teddy bear, sniffs it, then holds it out to me. “Can you smell smoke on this?”

  I sniff. “Yeah.”

  “Damn.”

  I check the tag sewn into the bear’s foot. “We can wash it at our house. I have a lot of laundry to do.”

  Mikey finds what he was looking for in the basket. “Twuck,” he crows, waving his fire truck in the air. “Woowoo-woo!” It’s a pretty good siren imitation.

  “You have to go grocery shopping, too,” Teri reminds me.

  The police have started to push people away from the barn. It’s ready to topple. Dad watches the crowd move backward and sighs.

  “If you want to go to work, Kate, that would be fine,” he says. “We don’t need you here. It’ll be all right.”

  I nod. Mikey drives his fire truck over my slipper. The wind runs over the new grass.

  “They’ve already called someone in to take my shift,” I say.

  “No, really,” Dad says. “The volunteers will be here soon. One of them can take Teri on her errands. You’ve got a lot to do. Plus, we have to talk about the college thing. We could do that at lunch.”

  I crouch down to gather the metal cars and trucks. “Don’t worry about it. I can take her. Mikey, too, if we can find a car seat.”

  Teri raises an eyebrow. “You’re driving me around? Not in those pajamas, you’re not.”

  The wind gusts hard and the crowd watching it steps farther back. The barn shakes once, then collapses. The timbers scatter on the ground like pickup sticks.

  4.2 Neutralization

  Before we leave, I refill Bert’s radiator and give him a friendly pat. Don’t let me down, buddy. We do not want to be stranded with these passengers.

  The engine starts the first time. Teri rolls down her window and fiddles with the radio as I wind my way to the main road. She taps the bumper sticker on my dashboard. “So, this MIT, it’s like a big deal, huh? A brainiac school?” she asks.

  I nod once, eyes ahead. “It’s the best, the very best.” Mikey throws a truck at the back of my seat.

  Teri chuckles. “You think I never heard of MIT? Duh. I’m not retarded, you know.”

  “Let’s not talk about MIT right now, okay?”

  She sits back. “Your dad said they blew you off. He didn’t want me to think you were being a bitch because you didn’t like me or anything.”

  “My father is a very sensitive man. Here, this is Betty’s house.”

  Teri and Mikey spend half an hour closed in the bedroom where Mrs. Litch is “recuperating.” Betty serves me tea and orange bundt cake and gives me the 411 about Mrs. Litch’s “conditions.” She has a number of them, apparently. At least Betty doesn’t bug me about college.

  A door slams. Teri strides through the kitchen without a word, dragging Mikey behind her. I guess that’s her way of saying we can leave now.

  Mikey is already buckled into his car seat by the time I get outside.

  “Hurry up,” Teri says.

  I start the car, buckle my belt, and reverse. “How’s your mother?”

  She flips the door lock up, down, up, down. “Coughing a little. Whining a lot.”

  “Is she excited about the house getting fixed?”

  Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

  All right, don’t answer me. I look in the rearview mirror. Mikey is watching the traffic, his thumb in his mouth.

  Up, down. Up, down.

  “Knock it off,” I say. “This car is a collector’s item.”

  Up, down.

  I try again. “Is she still upset about the fire? Does she want you and Mikey to stay with her?”

  “Okay, listen up, Katie. My mom got hit in the head with a bat once. My dad was holding the bat. Mom gets confused. She doesn’t understand what’s going on with the house. Hell, she thinks old Betty there is a cousin. I don’t want to talk about her anymore.”

  Up, down. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  Up, down. “I gotta get paid. Take a left.”

  Getting paid means a visit to The Moon, a biker bar on the lake. The owner pays Teri in cash, and I don’t have the guts to ask what kind of work she does for him. I’m just the driver. It’s a lot of money, though.

  What do you do after you get paid? You might think you would go to the bank. But not if you were Teri Litch. We go to Burgerbarf, where Teri and Mikey get jumbo-sized orders of french fries, soda, and cheeseburgers. Then I drive to the car wash so I can clean the jumbo soda Mikey spilled in the back. Then we go back to Burgerbarf for more fries. I drive them to the mall and stay in the car watching Bert’s temperature gauge. When they come out, Teri is holding a plain white bag, and Mikey is holding a strawberry ice cream cone. The cone is upside down on the seat before we leave the parking lot. She should never have gotten him a double scoop. Poor little guy. We revisit the car wash.

  When the seat is clean, I take a detour by the pharmacy so I can apologize, grovel, and beg to keep my job. After that, my afternoon on chauffeur duty crawls by at twenty-five miles an hour. Teri pays her family’s water bill and electric bill with cash. She spends forever in the social services office arguing about a check Mikey is supposed to be getting. After that, she’s on a rampage. She starts up a running monologue mocking my car, complaining about my driving, and bitching about the fire. Mikey throws cold french fries at my head, then falls asleep. I turn off the radio and Teri goes silent, watching the stores and the streets slip by.

  “I have to pick up my contacts now,” I say. No response. I check the mirror, get in the left lane, and turn when the green arrow flashes. “You can stay in the car if you want. It shouldn’t take long.”

  She turns around to check on Mikey. “He’s out cold. He’ll sleep.”

  I drive down
the boulevard a few more blocks, then pull into the shopping center. I park in front of Ocu-Brite.

  “You know how to use a hammer?” Teri asks as I open my door.

  “What?” I drop my keys in my purse.

  “Can you hammer things? Nails. Or are you a total spaz?” She snorts and turns to the window again. “Forget it. Go on. You’re a spaz. I shoulda known.”

  “No, open the eyelid wider, wider, that’s it, nice and big. Right. Now, keep the contact on the tip of your finger, ease it onto your eyeball, and . . . No. You have very dry eyes, don’t you? Let’s try some artificial tears.”

  Ocu-Brite’s official contact trainer is dressed like a medical person: white coat with big pockets, serious glasses, pager at her belt. It’s all bogus. She used to be a grocery store cashier. I can’t figure out if teaching people to poke themselves in the eye at Ocu-Brite is a step up or a step down on the job scale.

  “One more time,” the trainer says. “Deep breath.”

  I take a deep breath and study my eyeball. In the magnifying mirror, it’s as big as a grapefruit, with bright red capillaries snaking away from the pupil. I have Medusa eyes, and they are battling the contacts.

  As I peel back my eyelid, the bell on the front door jingles. Teri and Mikey toddle in.

  “Can I help you?” the contact trainer asks.

  “I doubt that,” Teri says. She sits next to me and looks in the magnifying mirror. “Dang, look at your nostrils! And you’ve got a zit getting ready to pop out. Right there, on your chin.”

  I push the mirror away. “Why didn’t you stay in the car?” I ask.

  “Mikey’s awake.”

  Mikey shoves a pile of magazines on the floor before running to the far end of the store.

  “Hurry up,” Teri tells me.

  Like she’s in any kind of position to be ordering me around. Like she hasn’t already messed up my day enough, plus my night when you figure I got about three hours of sleep.