“Can’t say, won’t snitch,” Charlie said resolutely. Kit couldn’t argue with that on principle, but she also didn’t think Charlie should take the fall if she wasn’t the only one to blame.
“We don’t know yet what could have provoked such . . . savage action,” Fowler answered. Kit took umbrage at the word savage and gathered it was not a slip of the tongue. Fowler went on. “I can’t imagine this came out of nowhere, but Leigh couldn’t tell us her side of the story because, well, she had a pencil sticking out of her face. She’s with Dr. Metzger being fixed up as we speak. We’ll need to meet with you and Leigh’s folks and see if we can’t put together what happened. Till then, Miz Walker, you’re gonna have to take Charlie home and keep her there till after the year-end tests. She can come back in two weeks or so when school is over to make up her tests—which I will proctor myself.”
“She’s out for the rest of school?” Kit said. “No, no, that’s not gonna work.”
“I can’t have her poking holes in my students, provoked or not.”
Kit gnashed a protest between her teeth. These days, anytime Charlie was home alone, she’d wander off without telling Kit where she’d gone. Kit would fret until Charlie sailed through the door like she’d done nothing wrong.
Fowler leaned in and lowered her voice.
“Miz Walker, ever think maybe Charlotte needs a man in the house?” She looked down her nose at Kit. “I don’t know what kind of home you run, but kids need discipline. Especially teenage girls.”
Anger boiled over Kit’s chest and behind her ears and clouded up her eyes. She jutted out her chin and set her knuckles on the yellowing varnished desk.
“I really don’t care for your opinion on how I run my home.” She swallowed a mouthful of expletives and stalked out, grabbing Charlie by the fist. In the hallway, Charlie yanked her hand away and barreled ahead of her mother and out the double doors that opened onto the parking lot. Kit let her go and leaned against a wall. Kit turned around to face the wall and stared at a bulletin board of planetary systems in gaudy glitter and neon paint. She would never be the mother who stayed up late gluing shit to colored paper, who enjoyed brushing her daughter’s hair shiny or packing little sandwiches cut just so and sealing the brown bag with a sticker. It all seemed so false and fussy. And yet she pitied the girl for being stuck with a mother like her. She pinched one corner of the bulletin backing between stained finger and thumb and peeled it away, exposing the pocked corkboard underneath. Without checking to see if anyone was around she ripped the whole thing off and walked out the doors.
Chapter Two
The old brown pickup rumbled down the road, kicking up dust that billowed and fanned out with the southerly wind. Kit gunned it over the train tracks to catch some air, one of the few ways folks got their kicks around here. Jumping the tracks and shooting bottles for skeet, watching garbage burn in massive pyres and drinking a case by the creek until they puked or passed out or both. Usually Charlie would hoot and make Kit turn around for another go, and again and again, laughing and jumping at the right moment so that they were, for a moment, suspended in air. But today she was slit-eyed and sullen.
Kit’s feelings pinballed from a salty anger that her daughter had gotten herself in trouble, to a guilty knowing that she had done worse in her day, to a darker, unsettled feeling she couldn’t quite place. Absently, she floated a hand over and rested it on the seat behind her daughter, not touching, but near. She couldn’t read this girl, who looked blankly at the road ahead. Until lately, she had always known what Charlie felt as if the feelings were her own. She felt it in the fibers of her muscle. Over the past year her daughter had drifted, her behavior unpredictable, her moods illegible. The stitches that had held them together were frayed, splitting with each big fight.
If only Charlie knew how lucky she was. A home, a nice school, a room of her own. And yet wasn’t the point to bring her up so she would never know the alternative? Had Kit chosen differently they could be living on the move. No address, just a different motel every week when they could afford it, crashing at shelters when they couldn’t. The musty couches, the sleeping bag cramps. Cheap food that didn’t spoil, washing the same pair of underwear every night and wearing them damp or just going without. The aching teeth, the shoes that pinched, the constant, scraping hunger. And yet she had protected Charlie from her past, as if even knowing about it could harm her daughter.
Charlie slipped off her boot and punched the radio on with her toe. It was tuned to an oldies station, clearest they could get at forty miles from Houston. The Bee Gees were on, kind of gasping like someone had grabbed onto their nuts. Those wobbling, tortured sounds were the soundtrack of that winter Kit spent with the Crowders or Crowleys, Crow-something. The memory of her foster mother, an average-bodied woman with great flaps that hung from her arms, serving her four children from a steaming saucepan something warm and good. Chicken and dumplings, maybe. Kit watched as she ladled it out, dividing it evenly between the four bowls, adding some here, taking away there, so that every child got an equally full bowl except Kit. Hers gaped open and empty in front of her.
The kids were increasingly older than her by about a year, and freckles pocked their faces like a disease. She watched them eat, blowing each bite and burning their mouths anyway. She pulled a slice of bread from its sleeve and folded it over and ate it like it was a sandwich and not just a bare fragment of a meal. When it was clear she would not be served, she slid off the chair—she was small enough that her feet did not touch the floor—and went to the kitchen. Bracing her feet against the base of the refrigerator, she threw herself back to open the door. She gathered everything she could hold in her arms and had a feast of her own making in the dark of the pantry, a killing of condiments, leftovers in aluminum foil, a black banana. That family had not been cruel to her, had not beaten or punished her, like others had. But the pain of being overlooked hurt more than any whipping.
As they drove off the farm road onto the rutty dirt path toward home, the whoop whoop of a siren nearly stopped Kit’s heart. She cursed, slowed, and stopped. After all these years, she was still jumpy around police.
“Do you think Leigh’s parents called the cops?” Charlie asked, looking more thrilled than worried.