What’s the bus driver’s name? Do you know?
Luther looked at his wife. Do we know her name, honey?
Betty shook her head.
We never did hear her name. The one with the yellow hair is all we know.
Yes, well. Would you like me to call and find out what’s going on?
Call that principal too. Tell him what she been doing to us.
I’ll make a phone call for you. But you have to do your part too.
We already been doing our part.
I know, but you need to try to get along with her, don’t you. What would you do if your children couldn’t ride the bus?
They looked at Rose and then across the room at the poster taped on the wall. LEAP — Low-Energy Assistance Program, all in red letters.
Let’s see then, Rose said. I’ve got your food stamps here. She produced the stamps from the file on the table, booklets of one, five, ten, and twenty-dollar denominations, each in a different color. She slid the packets across the table and Luther gave them to Betty to put in her purse.
And you received your disability checks on time this month? Rose said.
Oh yeah. They come in the mail yesterday.
And you’re cashing the checks like we talked about and putting the money in separate envelopes for your various expenses.
Betty’s got them. Show her, dear.
Betty removed four envelopes from her purse. RENT, GROCERIES, UTILITIES, EXTRAS. Each envelope with Rose Tyler’s careful printing in block letters.
That’s fine. Now is there anything else today?
Luther glanced at Betty, then turned toward Rose. Well, my wife keeps on talking about Donna. Seems like she always got Donna on her mind.
I just been thinking about her, Betty said. I don’t see why I can’t call her on the phone. She’s my daughter, isn’t she.
Of course, Rose said. But the court order stipulated that you have no contact with her. You know that.
I just want to talk to her. I wouldn’t have no kind of contact. I just want to know how she’s been doing.
Calling her would be considered contact, though, Rose said.
Betty’s eyes filled with tears and she sat slumped in her chair with her hands open on the table, her hair fallen about her face, a few strands stuck to her wet cheeks. Rose extended a Kleenex box across the table, and Betty took one and began to wipe at her face. I wouldn’t bother her, she said. I just want to talk to her.
It makes you feel bad, doesn’t it.
Wouldn’t you feel bad? If it was you.
Yes. I’m sure I would.
You just got to try and make the best of it, dear, Luther said. That’s all you can do. He patted her shoulder.
She isn’t your daughter.
I know that, he said. I’m just saying you got to get on the best way you know how. What else you going to do? He looked at Rose.
What about Joy Rae and Richie? Rose said. How are they doing?
Well, Richie, he’s been fighting at school, Luther said. Come home the other day with his nose all bloody.
That’s cause them other kids been picking fights with him, Betty said.
I’m going to teach him how to fight them back one of these days.
What’s causing this, do you think? Rose said.
I don’t know, Betty said. They just always been picking on him.
Does he say anything?
Richie don’t say nothing to them.
That’s because I been teaching him: Turn the other cheek, Luther said. When they smite thee on one cheek, turn him the other one. It’s out of the Bible.
He only has two cheeks, Betty said. How many cheeks is he suppose to turn?
Yes, Rose said, there are limits, aren’t there.
We come to the limits, Betty said. I don’t know what we’re going to do.
No, Luther said, otherwise I guess we don’t got too much to complain about. He sat upright in his chair, apparently ready to leave, to move on to whatever came next. I guess we been doing pretty good for ourselves. You get what you get and don’t have a fit, what I always tell people. Somebody told that to me one time.
3
HE WAS A SMALL BOY, UNDERWEIGHT FOR HIS AGE, WITH thin arms and thin legs and brown hair that hung over his forehead. He was active and responsible, and too serious for a boy of eleven. Before he was born his mother decided not to marry the man who was his father, and when he was five she died in a car wreck in Brush Colorado on a Saturday night after she’d been out dancing with a redheaded man in a highway tavern. She had never said who his father was. Since her death he had lived alone with his mother’s father on the north side of Holt, in a dark little house with vacant lots on both sides and a gravel alley out back that had mulberry trees grown up beside it. At school he was in the fifth grade and he was a good student but spoke only when called on; he never volunteered anything in the classroom, and when he was let out of school each day he went home by himself or wandered around town or occasionally did yardwork for the woman who lived up the street.
His grandfather, Walter Kephart, was a white-haired man of seventy-five. For thirty years he’d been a gandy dancer on the railroad in southern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado. When he was almost seventy he got pensioned off. He was a silent old man; he would talk a good deal if he’d been drinking, but he was not a drunk and generally would take a drink at home only if he were sick. Each month when his pension check came he’d cash the check and spend an evening drinking at the Holt Tavern on the corner of Third and Main, where he would sit and visit with other old men in town and tell stories that were not exaggerated so much as they were simply enlarged a little, and then he’d remember for an hour or two what he had been able to do in the long-ago oldtime when he was still young.
The boy’s name was DJ Kephart. He took care of the old man, walking him home along the dark streets in the night when his grandfather was finished talking at the tavern, and at home he did most of the cooking and cleaning, and once a week washed their dirty clothes at the Laundromat on Ash Street.
One day in September he came home from school in the afternoon and the old man said the neighbor woman had been over, asking for him. You better go see what she wants.
When did she come?
This morning.
The boy poured out a cup of cold coffee from the pot on the stove and drank it and started toward the woman’s house. It was still hot outside, though the sun had begun to lean to the west, and the first intimations of fall were in the air — that smell of dust and dry leaves, that annual lonesomeness that comes of summer closing down. He walked past the vacant lot with its dirt path leading to a row of mulberry trees at the alley and then the two widows’ houses, both set back from the quiet street behind a dusty stand of lilac, and came to her house.
Mary Wells was a woman just past thirty with two young girls. Her husband worked in Alaska and returned home infrequently. Slim and healthy, a pretty woman with soft brown hair and blue eyes, she could have done all the yardwork herself but she liked helping the boy in this small way and always paid him something when he worked for her.
He knocked on the door of her house and waited. He thought he should not knock a second time, that it would be impolite and disrespectful. After a little while she came to the door wiping her hands on a dish towel. Behind her were the two girls.
Grandpa said you came over this morning.
Yes, she said. Will you come in?
No, I guess I better get started.
Don’t you want to come in first and have some cookies? We’ve been baking. They’re just fresh.
I drank some coffee before I left home, he said.
Maybe later then, Mary Wells said. Anyway I wondered if you had time to work in the backyard. If you don’t have something else you need to be doing right now.