Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Did your father come here with you?” asked a girl with black glasses and a small, curious face. She was from his table.

“My father died,” he said. Everyone was listening now. “Then my mother had to go to the hospital. I stayed with my uncle and aunt and cousins. They also have a Foster.”

“How did your father die?” asked the girl with glasses, kindly.

“He was in a parade with some other policemen, and they were on a float. My father fell off and hit his head.”

His new classmates stared. Even the boy in the corner turned around and stared, and the girl with glasses took them off as though they had become too heavy for her face. Miss Meeks stood and rapped on her desk. “Aaron Englund, you may return to your table. That’s enough Show and Tell for one day.”

When he sat down, the girl with glasses leaned toward him. “My puppy died,” she said. “The hired hand ran him over with the combine. We buried him by the barn.”

“Were you sad?” he whispered.

“Class,” said Miss Meeks, “we would expect the new boy to be more interested in making a good impression than in carrying on side conversations during precious class time. But perhaps rudeness is common where he comes from.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Meeks,” he said, but she did not respond to his apology except to hold up a large cutout of the letter V made from green construction paper, the two legs framing her face as though a giant frog were doing the splits in front of her.

“This is our letter for today. Can anyone tell me what letter it is?”

Several children raised their hands. Miss Meeks called on the pug-nosed girl. “V,” said the girl. “V as in Valentine.”

“That is correct, Kimberly. Valentine starts with V.” Miss Meeks faced the class, panting “vuh, vuh, vuh” at them, and they repeated it: “Vuh, vuh, vuh.”

“V-v-valentine,” said Miss Meeks. “Who can think of another word that starts with V?”

“Vegetable,” said the girl with the dead puppy, almost apologetically, which made Aaron like her even more.

“V-v-vegetable,” said Miss Meeks. “Good.”

“Vickie,” shouted the boy who had sat happily in the corner during Show and Tell. Everyone turned to look at a girl at Aaron’s table who had bread crumbs dusting her mouth and what appeared to be dried egg yolk on her chin.

“Vickie,” said Miss Meeks, “can you come up and write your name on the board for us?” The girl shook her head, scattering crumbs. Miss Meeks said, “Fine,” as though it were not really fine. “Other words, class?” she asked.

A very tall girl said, “Veterinarian,” which Aaron had never heard of, but when Miss Meeks said, “Does everyone know what a veterinarian is?” the class nodded, so he did not ask.

He raised his hand shyly, and Miss Meeks said, “Remember, it must start with V.”

“Vacancy,” he announced.

“Vacancy,” said Miss Meeks. “Perhaps the new boy would like to explain his word to the class.” He did not understand why she was mad, only that she was. She noted his confusion and looked pleased, and he realized that Miss Meeks did not think he knew what vacancy meant. His eyes burned. It means when there’s room for you, he wanted to say.

“Remember, children,” Miss Meeks said, “in my class there are no show-offs.”

His mother was waiting for him after school. On the way home, she walked far ahead of him, only turning once to ask how his day had gone.

“Okay,” he said, and she said, “Just okay?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What did you do?”

“I answered questions,” he said.

“Questions about what?” He could tell that she was interested.

“Moorhead,” he said. “Paul Bunyan.” He did not say his dead father.

* * *

Aaron did not know where his mother went after she left him at school each morning, but she was always back at noon, waiting for him on foot as the other children boarded the bus and rode home. This routine — walking, school, walking — became the order of their days, one he grew to appreciate because his mother seemed happiest as they walked. Their afternoons also followed a new pattern. When they arrived back at the house, his mother went into her bedroom and closed the door, and he waited — at the kitchen table or in his bedroom — while she rested. She never offered to make lunch first, but he did not mind because he knew that she was tired. Besides, he liked to prepare his own lunch. He always made the same thing, saltine crackers dipped in ketchup.

“I’ll have a dozen today,” he would say, out loud, to himself. Dozen was the word for twelve. He would count out twelve crackers, which he lined up around the rim of the plate like fallen dominoes. In the middle, he squirted the ketchup. After he finished eating, he drank a glass of water, gulping loudly, a sound that had always angered his father.

“How am I supposed to eat with you making that goddamn noise?” his father used to yell. “It’s like listening to a clogged drain.” One time, his father had jumped up from the supper table and retrieved a red plastic bottle from under the sink. Gripping Aaron’s head in the crook of his elbow, he tried to force Aaron’s mouth open as he held the red bottle above it. What had frightened Aaron most was the way his father trembled.

“Jerry, stop,” his mother had said, her voice low and scared. His father had stopped. Years later, when Aaron asked his mother about that night, she explained that it was Drano his father had threatened to pour down his throat. “He never would have done it,” she assured him. “He was just like that, always trying to scare people into changing.”

Mr. Rehnquist was part of their new routine also. On the first day of each month, he came by after supper to pick up the rent check. During these visits, he seemed awkward, not jolly and at ease as he had been the day they met him. Aaron’s mother said that it probably made him shy to be a guest in the house that he’d lived in as a boy. “Why?” Aaron had asked, and his mother said, “Well, there are things that happen in a house, things you don’t always like to think about. Maybe Mr. Rehnquist remembers those things when he comes here.”

Mr. Rehnquist’s visits always ended at the kitchen table with the adults drinking coffee while Mr. Rehnquist quizzed Aaron about school, about what he was learning and how he was getting on with Miss Meeks, the latter a question to which Aaron gave brief replies because he did not want Mr. Rehnquist to think less of him for failing to win over his teacher.

“How’s crazy Betty behaving?” Mr. Rehnquist asked one night in the silence after they’d finished discussing school.

“You’ll have to ask Aaron,” his mother said. “They’re good friends, you know.”

Aaron realized only then that Mr. Rehnquist was referring to Betty Otto, who lived in the house behind them, but he did not understand why his mother would say they were friends. It was true they sometimes chatted, but he did not think that chatting constituted a friendship, though he did not really understand what friendship involved. His mother said it was natural to want the company of others, sounding almost suspicious of those who did not, despite her own friendlessness.

“She still busy with that garden?” Mr. Rehnquist asked him.

“Yes,” Aaron said.

“She’s also busy shooting off her gun,” his mother said.

“She shoots squirrels because they ruin her garden,” Aaron said.

This garden lay on the other side of a row of tall pine trees that served as a boundary marker. When they first moved in, Aaron had often knelt on the bed in his new room, staring out the window at the garden and the house beyond. He soon discovered that a woman lived there, thin with milky skin and curly hair as red as a clown’s. She had a dog that she usually kept tied to a pole beside the doghouse, which sat in front of the real house like its shadow. Aaron always noted the dog’s location because he was afraid of dogs. Those first several weeks, he had spied on the house as he waited for his mother to finish resting, until one afternoon he knew that he could not stay inside even one second longer. He rose and went out into the front yard, where he paced with frantic anticipation. When nothing happened, he walked around to the backyard and stood in the knee-high grass beside the pine trees.