Lone Star
And then, three years later, after another tragedy, Jimmy blamed not only Kenny for all the misfortune, but also Burt for not being man enough to get up every morning and drive the bus. It didn’t matter to Jimmy the pain Burt was in. Living three houses apart, the Hauls and the Devines stayed barely civil, even though Lang kept pointing out in feeble attempts to effect a truce between the men that Burt had done nothing wrong. “It’s not his fault he has a weak back, Jimmy.”
“Nothing wrong,” Jimmy said, “except stroll out of Brucie’s Diner with his arms full of meatloaf at precisely and absolutely the worst moment. Nothing wrong except not go to work, and ruin everybody’s fucking life.”
“He’s suffering too, Jimmy.”
“That’s why I said everybody’s fucking life, Mother.”
Chloe and Moody stood shoulder to shoulder near two graves in the small rural cemetery under the pines as tall and gray as emerald redwoods. Chloe placed all the flowers they had brought in front of a black granite tombstone that read “JAMES PATRICK DEVINE, JR. 1998-2001.”
Moody made her put half of them on Kenny’s stupid grave.
They stood with their heads bent. Moody held on to Chloe’s arm.
“Do you come here with your mother?”
“Sometimes.”
“How often does she come?”
“I don’t know.” The gravesite was beautifully tended, weeded, neatened, full of flowering azaleas, faded lilacs, knockabout roses. “Often, from the looks of it.”
“Your dad?”
“When Mom forces him.”
Moody nodded. “You have to forgive Uncle Kenny,” she said. “It’s not his fault he was born with bad genes and couldn’t walk straight. Not everybody can make a life like your mom and dad, child. Not everybody can push his own wheelchair. Some aren’t so lucky.”
“Yes. Like my brother.”
“Yes. Like him. But he was lucky to be loved. That love is better than hate for my Kenny. No question he did wrong. But it wasn’t all his fault. Sometimes catastrophic things just happen. And your father doesn’t understand that.”
Moody bent her head deeper. Chloe too.
“He understands,” Chloe said. “But that’s not what happened here. A catastrophic thing didn’t just happen.”
They stood.
“What was the poem you used to recite to Jimmy? He knew it by heart. You and he were so cute with it. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“Something about Santa, and vampires. Come on. You do remember. Tell your grandmother. It’s a sin to lie to old people.”
“I don’t remember, Moody.” Chloe ground her teeth. She didn’t tell, though she well remembered.
I wonder if Santa Claus is real
The Easter Bunny
The Tooth Fairy too
I wonder if ghosts really say boo
I wonder if leprechauns collect pots of gold
I wonder if vampires ever grow old.
Little Jimmy, who used to yell YES for the first five and an emphatic NO to the last, had been conceived around the time of Uncle Kenny’s death. Her parents had been trying for little Jimmy all of Chloe’s life. For all she knew, she was supposed to be little Jimmy and they had been trying for nine years before she was born and for eleven after. In some ways her mother was very much a Chinese mother. Two decades of trying for that one highly valued masculine child. Jimmy lived for three very good years. Their little cabin in the woods was full of noise and tricycles and paint on the walls and mess everywhere, and Lang didn’t care, and Jimmy didn’t care. Jimmy came home at six o’clock sharp every night, punctual as Big Ben. Lang called the Fryeburg police station a dozen times a day. Jimmy, you won’t believe what your son just said, Jimmy, you’ll never guess what your son just did.
When it was time for little Jimmy to go to nursery school, he was so excited to be taking the big boy school bus. He would jump with joy off the curb when he would see the blue bus pulling up to take him home. One early afternoon Brian Hansen’s wallet had fallen into the footwell. He noticed it when he was in the parking lot, about to pull up to the waiting kids. He bent down to retrieve it. He was driving so slowly. He thought he could take his eyes off the road for just a second. But Jimmy was little and his bones were greensticks. They were no match for a school bus, even a small one, even a slow one.
Lang was at ShopRite buying fruit snacks and juice boxes. Big Jimmy was in a meeting about police logistics for the upcoming summer festival. Chloe was in ninth grade math, dreaming of a tuna sandwich she was about to eat for lunch.
Had Uncle Kenny not broken Burt’s back, Burt would have been driving the blue bus as he had been driving it for thirteen years. Burt would have never taken his eyes off the road. But Kenny did break Burt’s back. And with Burt out of action, the town had hired an out-of-towner with “very good credentials” to drive over the little ones to and fro.
Afterward, Burt didn’t care how bad his back was. Though big Jimmy said it was one fucking day too late, Burt stuck a syringe of cortisone into his thigh three times a week and got behind the wheel of the bus until the town gently retired him, because every time he went over a pothole, he cried out in such anguish that the little kids shrieked in terror. Fryeburg had to either repair the town’s potholes or golden-shake Burt’s hand. The second option was cheaper.
On Jimmy’s tombstone: “THE LORD GIVETH AND THE LORD TAKETH AWAY.”
Other repercussions: three years ago, Mason comforted Chloe by taking her hand one summer night and becoming her boyfriend.
Still other repercussions: instead of Barcelona, Chloe was headed to an orphanage in Latvia. Damn Uncle Kenny to all hell.
After it happened, Lang did not come out of her house for five months. Then she bought a sewing machine, learned how to stitch herself bright new clothes and staggered on. She bought a heat-gun and heat-cured paints and took up painting lifesize dolls, the height of a small girl, or perhaps a boy. She made fifty of them, and then sold them on consignment, immersing herself instead in gardening with Chloe. The money from the fifty dolls was still dribbling in. And now Lang was giving some of it to Chloe to go to Latvia to search for another lifesize boy.
14
The Meaning of Typos
YOU HAD TO GIVE IT TO HER. LANG TRIED. BY HERSELF SHE took Chloe to apply for a passport. Turned out both parents had to be physically present to sign the application. Chloe, of course, knew why her mother would prefer her father not come, but said nothing.
With Jimmy in tow, Lang quickly filled out the application form while Chloe, bored and hungry and anxious because her mother was anxious, tried to distract her father. The scene would’ve been funny if her mother wasn’t so stressed out. Her dad, bless him, was barely paying attention to the words Lang was writing down, but when it came time to sign, he moved Lang’s hand away from the paper so he could sign his name by the X at the bottom, and casually glanced over the document.
“Mother,” he said, “why are you so careless? You’re as bad as the incompetents in the school records department. Look, you’ve misspelled her name.” He turned to the postal clerk. “Dave, get us another application. My wife here doesn’t know her own daughter’s name.”
“Sure thing, chief.”
“Thanks, buddy. Careful this time,” Jimmy told Lang. “Want me to do it?”
“No, your handwriting is terrible. I’ll do it.”
“At least I know how to spell.”
“Who can tell? No one can read it.”
He watched her.
Lang gestured to Chloe, who once again tried to distract her father with idle chatter about the upcoming prom, graduation, her dress, a limo, a chaperone. Lang said her pen was running out of ink; could Jimmy go get her another?
He went, but as soon as he returned, he peered over the top of her rounded shoulder.
“Lang! You did it again. What’s the matter with you? I don’t know what’s wrong with your mother today, Chloe. Dave, sorry, I need one more application.”
Lang sighed and straightened up from the counter. Chloe stepped away. She made eye contact with Dave and shook her head, as if to signal him to wait, but also to scram because all kinds of crap was about to go down inside the peaceful Fryeburg post office on a weekday afternoon.
Lang placed her hand on her husband’s chest, on Chloe’s father, Jimmy Devine. “Jimmy,” she said mildly. “Wait.”
He waited.
“I didn’t misspell it, Jimmy,” Lang said. “Look.”
She thrust Chloe’s birth certificate into his face. Jimmy stared, perplexed. Plain as noon, printed in black, with a raised seal from the state of Maine confirming the official nature of the words was “Divine.” Preceded by “Chloe Lin.”
Jimmy understood nothing. “For eighteen years you knew the registrar’s office misspelled our kid’s name and you never told me?”
“Oh well.” Lang patted him. “Nothing we can do about it now. Let’s sign and go.”
“Nothing we can do about it?” he bellowed. “Of course there’s something we can do about it.”
“Not in time for her to get her passport for Europe.”
“She can’t have a passport with her name misspelled in it, Mother,” Jimmy said in his best no-arguments-will-be-entertained chief-of-police voice. “A passport is good for ten years. But a mistake like this is forever. No.”
“Jimmy.”
“No! I said we will fix it and we will fix it.”
Lang did not raise her voice. “It’s not misspelled, Jimmy,” she said. “That’s what I told the lady to write.”
“What lady?” He was dumbfounded.
“The lady at the hospital who came to take the baby’s name for the birth certificate. I told her to write Divine.”
“Well, the idiot clearly didn’t hear you correctly. She needs to be fired. Chloe is not going to have the wrong name on her passport because of a typo.”
“It’s not a typo, Jimmy. I spelled it out for her. I told her to write D-I-V-I-N-E.”
There was commotion at the post office. A man was taping a box shut, the plastic ripping off loudly. The metal door to the postmaster’s quarters slammed, a phone trilled, somebody laughed.
Jimmy was mute.
“It’s not a typo,” Lang repeated. “I wanted her to be Chloe Divine.”
“You made a mistake.”
“I wrote Divine on purpose.”
“But our name is Devine! With an E!”
“I know that. But not her name.”
Jimmy stammered. “What are you saying, woman? That you deliberately gave my daughter a different last name from her father?”
“Same name. One letter different.”
“That’s a different name!”
“No. Just one different letter.”
“A different name!”
“Jimmy.”
Jimmy was hyperventilating.
Chloe hid her amusement. She knew her mother was being disingenuous, for no one knew the power of a letter or two better than Lang, who could have been Lin, which meant beautiful, or Liang, which meant good and excellent, or Lan, which meant orchid, but instead she was Lang, which meant sweet potato. Lang knew the difference between Devine and Divine very well, which is why she changed it in the first place, why she wrote it with an I, why she kept it from her husband for nearly eighteen years. She knew. Divine: altogether marvelous and lovely, celestial and glorious, of the gods, with the gods, exquisite, heavenly, limitless and great. Divine.
15
She Will Be Loved
AT THE END OF JUNE, CHLOE WENT TO HER PROM. IT WAS held in the glass ballroom at the Grand Summit Hotel in Attitash, at the foot of the White Mountains. All the boys dashing, all the girls beautiful. Chloe tried not to judge through her mother’s eyes: who was on parade at a bordello? A few would’ve fit that description. Mackenzie O’Shea in particular. The trouble with Mackenzie was that she thought herself to be quite a tasty morsel. Chloe couldn’t figure out why Mackenzie annoyed her so much. Plenty of girls at the prom were dressed much sluttier.
Mason did his best to match his cummerbund to Chloe’s funky pewter jewelry and silk silver dress, but he was more granite than metal. Hannah, of course, was a tall glass of water in a clingy mango dress, almost like a slip, with shoulder straps and a bare back, but Hannah had nothing to reveal under her dress except skin, no folds, no fat, no breasts, no sags, nothing unseemly, nothing out of proportion, nothing to make her self-conscious. Her dress was low-cut, but because she was so slim, she didn’t look slutty, she looked royal. Chloe, on the other hand, couldn’t wear anything low-cut for obvious reasons, and she couldn’t wear anything too high-necked because then she looked like a retiring female politician. She couldn’t wear an open-back dress because she required a full-back bra to contain what she normally contained under three or four layers of clothing. Summer was always a challenge. She opted for lifeguard bathing suits—red and two sizes too tight—that slammed anything that might bounce against her sternum. Unfortunately, bathing suits were not a dress option for the prom.
After searching for most of her senior year, Chloe finally found something she could wear—a flapper dress, vintage and hand-beaded in glass. It had a cascading fringe, a straight fall and an almost modest V-neck. She wriggled into a square-necked black Spanx slip to cover up her cleavage, and after putting on black eyeliner and black satin sandals, was generally pleased with her almost Audrey Hepburn–like appearance. She left her hair mirror-shiny and down, and wore a red lipstick and a red rose corsage to contrast with the silver beads. She also contrasted well, she thought, against Mackenzie’s pink tutu of a dress, against the girl’s infuriatingly long legs and cheap stilettos. Mackenzie’s straps looked ready to snap at any moment—on her shoes and her shoulders. What a mess that girl was. Why didn’t the boys think so?
While Hannah and Taylor and Courtney spent the day fussing with their hair and makeup, Chloe was done by one. She then sat on her manicured hands and waited, dreaming about Europe and fretting about traveling from Riga to Barcelona.
“It’s two thousand miles by train, Chloe,” Blake had said to her. “What’s the big deal? In July a band of men travel two thousand miles up the French Alps on their bikes. It takes them three weeks. You’re telling me we can’t do the same sitting on a train?”
Chloe had been wrong about Blake. As soon as he heard of the new plan for Europe, he produced maps and atlases, guides on the Baltics, a Latvian–English dictionary, several National Geographics about flying around the Baltic Sea, the 1915 partition of Poland, and a story on the last of the Polish Jews. Absurdly, he acted more excited about going to Riga than to Barcelona. He told her he had always wanted to visit Vilnius. Chloe corrected his geography, told him Vilnius was in Lithuania, not Latvia, and he corrected her right back, telling her that you couldn’t get to Poland from Latvia without first going through Lithuania and the Gates of Dawn. Jostling Hannah, shaking her like a bear shakes a rabbit in his mouth, play punching Mason, filling his notebook with pages and pages of notes and facts and stories and asides about Riga and Vilnius and Warsaw, a thrilled Blake acted as if it was paradise already.
For the prom Jimmy lent the four of them his Durango, and Blake drove them to Grand Summit. Initially they had planned to rent a white limo and go in style, like some of the other kids. But now that they had the expanded trip to the post-Communist world and three weeks of travel to budget for, no one wanted to plonk down eight hundred bucks on a limo. To save money, Blake and Mason even said they would forego tuxes, until Janice put her foot down, thank God, and paid for their tux rental herself.
The girls had seen their boys in suits once before, at a funeral, before Chloe and Mason started dating, but tonight was different. Mason, of course, was groomed like a country-club lawn, but even Blake made an effort to comb his hair and trim his stubble. It was funny how he tried to fit his all-over-the-place self into a black tux and patent leather shoes. Though he looked handsome, he didn’t look as if he were born to it. After the first fifteen attempts to fix his crooked bow tie, Hannah gave up.
Chloe and Mason had been nominated for prom queen and king. The king and queen were voted on as a pair, and Chloe knew she was holding Mason back from winning. Without her he would have been prom king for sure, but she was never going to be prom queen, not even in a dress with beads shimmering and clinking like champagne glasses. It’s an honor just to be nominated, cooed Taylor, trying to stay positive.
The week the nominations had come out, Chloe had found an anonymous note stuffed into her locker. How does it feel to know you are keeping that boy from winning what is rightfully his? Chloe threw the note in the trash, but she thought about it now, on the dance floor with Mason. She couldn’t ignore the sense that other girls were appraising them, and concluding that she wasn’t good enough for that boy.
Fed up with their imaginary glances, Chloe excused herself. In the bathroom, she took off her dress and squirmed out of the suffocating Spanx. Her liberated breasts rose up in rebellion out of their gunmetal V. With cleavage on display, she looked much less like Audrey Hepburn and more like a squat Sophia Loren. Perhaps this was a more fitting look for an almost prom queen.
She strode out into the ballroom where Mason was waiting. The way he smiled at her, it was worth it to overlook for tonight one of her mother’s more critical mottos against revealing clothing.
Mason was a great and special boy. Although he wasn’t much of a dancer, tonight he kept up with Chloe song after song, dancing alongside Blake and Hannah, doing the Macarena, seeing how low he could go under the limbo stick. Pretty low, it turned out. Lower than Blake, even. She touched his face as they danced. She kissed him. On the dance floor she was almost allowed to do this. The Academy’s six vile lunch ladies had transformed themselves into equally vile prom chaperones. They waddled between the tables like malevolent mallards, quacking. What are you doing? You’re sitting too close. No public displays of affection, go dance, but respectably. Are you finished with your dinner? You haven’t touched your steak, your mother and father will be pleased to see their hard-earned money going into the garbage. Fix the straps on your dress, young lady, Miss Divine, your dress is riding inappropriately low. Miss Divine, I’ll thank you to keep your hands on the table, not on your boyfriend’s lap. Mr. Haul, please remove your paws from your date’s bare back. Miss Gramm, do you have a shawl you can throw on? You look cold. Miss Divine, do you have a shawl you can throw on? Mason, honey, you look wonderful tonight. As you were, dear boy. As you were.
Although the occasion was jolly, Hannah seemed less jolly than usual. When they had a minute to themselves on the dance floor, Chloe pulled Hannah close. Keith Urban’s “You’ll Think of Me” was playing.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said to her friend.
“Nothing. Why? Do I seem off?”
“Little bit.”
“No, I’m fine.” She patted Chloe. “It’s all good.”
“You look beautiful.”
“You too. Very va-va-voom.” Hannah sighed. “He’s threatened suicide, you know.”
“Who?”
“Martyn, of course. Says he can’t handle it. What am I going to do? How am I going to go to UMaine, knowing I’ll run into him?”
“I don’t know,” Chloe replied, a little too loudly and brightly, as if delighted by the possibility that Hannah might consider not going to UMaine.
“Maybe I should just join the Peace Corps.”
“What?”
“Why not? I’m an idealistic young person. I’d like to visit Ecuador. They travel all the time. I’d meet new people. Experience different cultures.”
“Um, are you selfless and unobtrusive?”
“Yes.”
“You know they don’t get paid, right? They’re volunteers. It’s not like joining the army.”
“I won’t need any money. I’ll be in Ecuador.” Hannah’s long arms draped over Chloe’s neck. She smelled of Dior Poison. It drowned out Chloe’s gentle musky scent. Chloe patted Hannah’s bare back. She could feel the blades of her shoulders, like wooden fence boards.
“The Peace Corps has been in the news lately,” Chloe said. “And not in a positive light. They may have forgotten their initial objectives.”
Hannah chuckled, pulled Chloe closer, ran her hand over Chloe’s hair. “Silly girl,” she said. “I love how you’re always trying to talk me out of bad choices. Don’t worry, cutie. I’m not serious about the Peace Corps. Besides, I can’t not go to UMaine. I’d never leave you there by your lonesome. So don’t worry. You want to go find our boys?”
A pasted-on smile greeted Hannah when the girls disengaged. “Cheer up,” Hannah said as the girls made their way through the taffeta and satin jungle, searching for their dates. “Like you said, we’re not Darlene Duranceau. Everything’s still ahead of us.”
They got separated. Chloe remained at the edge of the pulsing, strobe-lighting floor. Somewhere on the other side of the ballroom, near white walls and glass doors, reflected in black windows and royal mirrors, Chloe glimpsed Mason, his spiky hair, smiling mouth, delight, bow tie, surrounded by a flurry of shiny silk snowflakes, a lake of reflected satin and soft flesh. In other words, encircled by the cheer squad, blonde hair and soprano giggles all. They were trying to ensnare him in their ribald karaoke routine. In the strobes Mason was being girl-handled, teased, laughed at, pawed. It all throbbed across in fractions of real time, two seconds of black followed by a neon explosion. Chloe couldn’t even be sure it was him. It could have been nothing more than a flash of athletic-field memory. After school, she sits in the bleachers and does her homework, while on the field Mason pitches and flirts with the flirty girls. But mostly he pitches, and mostly Chloe reads, and it’s only for a fraction of an image between blinks and pages that Chloe thinks, is there something there or is it just adolescent fun? She barely even thinks it. She feels it, and in only two or three beats out of a whole minute of her heart.
“Chloe,” a voice says. She blinks and comes to.
Blake was in front of her, smiling, appraising her with his familiar eyes, soaking up her shiny baubles, glittering beads, perhaps other luscious things.
“Have you seen Hannah?”
“She’s looking for you. Seen Mason?”
“He was over there.” Blake waved to the glassy parquet. David Bowie started up. Almost involuntarily their bodies moved up and down and sideways to the pulsing one-TWO, one-TWO of “Let’s Dance.”
As they were already gyrating, they gyrated toward each other, looking around for Hannah, for Mason, Chloe trying to make her breasts bob less (not easy) and make her tacked-on smile less uncomfortable. Her ears ringing like the bells of Notre Dame, Chloe wished she could check her watch. David Bowie was so loud. Oh my God, she thought, am I really that old? Is David Bowie too loud for me at seventeen? Let’s dance.
Maroon 5 came on, kinder, softer, better, lights flashing, bodies inching closer, and she and Blake inched reluctantly closer with apologetic smiles. Sorry there’s no one else to dance with to Adam Levine, their awkward expressions read. Then he opened his arms. She raised hers and stepped up to the Blakeplate. Placing one hand into his, she rested the other on his large tuxy shoulder. She felt the pressure of his palm low around her waist, felt his open fingers not just resting against the back of her flapper dress, but holding her.