All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

  “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 mo
st 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.”