Then her junior year in high school, she got pregnant and ran away with Liam Quinn. We didn’t like him, but we’d never tried to keep her away from him. He was a troublemaker and I didn’t feel he treated Valerie right. The sort of boy who thinks he’s the center of the universe.
Later I found out he was worse than just a selfish boy. I found out he’d gotten her mixed up with the sorts of things that put her in prison. As for that whole mess, it wearied my heart. I hoped Brenda wouldn’t hate me when she found out how much of Irv’s pension I cashed out to pay for Valerie’s lawyers. I’d hoped to do college money for Amy and Leslie, but there was nothing left for that.
The first day I took Wavonna home with me, she didn’t speak. To be honest, she didn’t talk for weeks. That’s harder on your nerves than you might think, having another person in the room who won’t speak. It turned me into a real chatterbox. I narrated everything I did, the way I had for Irv when he got bad at the end.
The first night, Wavonna didn’t eat dinner. The next morning, no breakfast. By lunch the next day, I started to get a taste of why Brenda looked so broken. Three days of worrying, before I had the sense to count things in the fridge and cupboard to tell what she was eating. At bedtime, I had six cheese slices in cellophane, nine apricots in the crisper, thirteen saltines in the open tube. In the morning, only five cheese slices, seven apricots, ten saltines. Not enough to keep a mouse alive, but she managed on it.
The second day, I set out some new toys I’d bought her on the coffee table in the den. It had out-of-fashion pine paneling and shag carpet, but we’d used it as our family room when Irv was alive, so it was full of mostly happy memories. I spent the day piecing a quilt for a church fundraiser and watching the TV. Wavonna sat on the sofa, staring at the wall or the TV or nothing. The girl had a hundred-yard stare like Irv had when he came back from the war. Once she got up, and I thought, Finally, she’s bored. She’ll do something. Play with her toys.
She went to the powder room. The toilet flushed and the sink ran. Back she came to the couch. The Barbie, the stuffed elephant, and the Lincoln Logs stayed in their packages and eventually they disappeared.
After two weeks, I did what I should have done first. I bought some flash cards—letters, colors, shapes, numbers—the kind of thing they use in kindergarten classes. The next morning, I made her a nice bowl of oatmeal and went out of the kitchen for a good fifteen minutes. I spent the time calling the gals in my bridge club to tell them I wasn’t coming that afternoon. When I went back to the kitchen, sure enough, there was less oatmeal. I cleared the table and got out the alphabet cards.
“A is for Apple.” I knew she wasn’t going to parrot back what I said, but at least she’d be seeing and hearing them.
I went through the whole deck that way. When I finished, Wavonna walked over to the counter and got the grocery pad. Some claptrap thing Irv built that held a roll of adding machine tape and had a hole drilled in it for a golf pencil. Wavonna rolled out some paper and started writing the alphabet. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.
I reached over and put my finger on the A. “Do you know how to say that one?”
Wavonna considered my finger for a second before she said, “A.”
“What about this one?”
“B.”
“This one.”
She sighed and said, “Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.” Silly Grandma.
Come Monday, I enrolled her for school.
The first day, after I dropped her off at school, I took a two-hour nap. The second day, I went for some much-needed beautification. Old women need sprucing up and my hair was starting to look bedraggled. The third day, I don’t remember what I did, but on the fourth day I went to bridge club. I had a martini and a lovely raucous time with the gals. They were expecting me to tell them all about Wavonna, and I pretended to be the proud grandma. Oh, she has the finest, baby-down blond hair. She already knows her ABCs. Nothing really about her.
I held Leslie in my arms after she was born. Same with Amy. They were my granddaughters, my babies. I flashed their pictures and bragged on every little accomplishment.
Wavonna, I’d never seen her until Brenda got custody of her. I know you’re supposed to love the hard ones more, but most of what I felt was pity. Her wispy hair and scrawny shoulders were so sad, and then those empty looks. Leaving bridge club, though, I felt like it was going to be okay. I would learn to love Wavonna the way I loved Leslie and Amy. She would learn to love me.
When I got to the school, Wavonna didn’t come out. I waited for a few minutes before I went into the front office, where I was met by the school principal and Mrs. Berry, Wavonna’s teacher. I’d handed Wavonna off to her on the first day in the school office. She was a friendly woman with a big smile, but that day she was a hysterical, sobbing mess.
Wavonna had run away from school.