Mercy Street(12)

It was the first time in her life she had money of her own, which would have been incentive enough, but she also liked the cars. Most were junk, but a few were authentically beautiful: a Plymouth Belvedere, midsixties vintage; a ’63 Ford Falcon in mint condition—kept for years in a widow’s garage, her dead husband’s pride and joy.

In the 1980s these models weren’t as rare as they are now. Sometimes you even saw them on the road, the sort of rusted-out wreck a teenager could pick up for a hundred bucks and spend his entire adolescence lying under, trying to get the thing to run. Later, in high school, Claudia would date one of those boys, a mute gearhead with black fingernails. At Clayburn High almost nobody had a car, but if you did, that was who you were.

She loved the body shop, with its smell of tires and Turtle Wax. She even liked the guys. Growing up in a female household, she was unnerved by deep voices and especially, male laughter. But the body shop guys—Ricky, Roy, Tip, and Gary—laughed all the time, so she got used to it. The body shop guys found themselves hilarious. They cursed and crowed, they waged meaningless arguments: the best sandwich, bass guitarist, kung fu movie. The most lethal poisonous snake. The best goalie of all time. Each guy had a role to play—Ricky the wiseass, Roy the mimic, Tip the straight man. Gary, the quiet one, spoke only in riddles: Polish jokes, blonde jokes. His jokes were never funny, which made them funny.

The body shop guys ignored her completely, which was all she wanted. She zoned out and listened to the radio, Led Zep or Iron Maiden or sometimes, the oldies station. This happened mainly on Fridays, when the owner, an old greaser with a graying pompadour, stopped by. The owner was a throwback in every way: his hair slick with Brylcreem, the novelty bowling shirts he wore to hide his high belly, which began at the sternum. He had a surprisingly beautiful tenor voice, and when he sang along with the Beach Boys or Del Shannon, Claudia fell a little in love with him.

She also fell in love with the Falcon. Due to its age and pristine condition, it was kept in an indoor bay, and once, when the guys were busy at the front of the shop, she tried the door and found it unlocked. Its interior smelled of lube and gasoline and some kind of male grooming product, deodorant or aftershave.

She didn’t sit in the driver’s seat. She sat in the back like a daughter on television. A cherished daughter being driven somewhere, her mother in the passenger seat, her father at the wheel.

IT WAS AN ACKNOWLEDGED FACT IN THE BIRCH FAMILY THAT Claudia was born out of wedlock, an expression used without irony in their part of Maine. Even her mother used it. Claudia can remember her talking on the phone to Aunt Darlene, about a wedding announcement in the Clayburn Star. Deb knew for a fact that the bride had a kid already, born out of wedlock.

Wedlock. The word sounded ominous, punitive, faintly medieval. Also, wedlock rhymed with headlock, a word Claudia knew from WWF wrestling—a perennial favorite with the fosters, boys and girls alike.

The phone was a central feature of Claudia’s childhood, a princess model bolted to the kitchen wall, its receiver connected by a long spiraling cord. Stretched to its full length, the cord reached to every corner of the trailer so that Deb could spend every waking minute on it, as a princess would presumably do. While making dinner or changing diapers or washing dishes or sitting on the toilet, she squabbled with her mother or gossiped with Darlene, their conversations punctuated with cawing laughter. She was happier on the phone than off it, and who could blame her? Trapped in a trailer with a pile of hyperactive kids, many people would do worse.

Claudia knew little about the circumstances of her conception, because her mother was a prude and a secretive person generally. Deb had given birth at seventeen, which meant dropping out of high school; her parents—stern Yankees who believed in paying the piper—weren’t about to clean up a daughter’s mistake. The man who got her pregnant was older and married and did not in the end divorce his wife, as Deb wanted him to do.

The man who got her pregnant. That’s how Claudia thought of him. That is what he was.

Her mother was secretive, so she sought answers elsewhere. According to Uncle Ricky, the man had worked as a linesman for the electric company. Deb met him when he came to the house to restore power after a storm. Whether the man had a wife or children, Ricky didn’t mention. It wasn’t the sort of thing he paid attention to. He’d had several of each, and had barely noticed his own.

Her aunt Darlene told a different story. Deb had earned pocket money by babysitting for a family in town. At the end of the night, the man of the house—who may or may not have worked for the electric company—would drive her home.

Don’t you want to find him? Claudia had been asked this more than once—usually on a second or third date, by men who were themselves fathers. The question said more about the person asking than it did about her.

She was conceived in May of 1971, when her mother was a junior in high school. The age of consent in Maine was sixteen. As far as the state was concerned, there was nothing wrong with a grown man impregnating a teenager, a girl who still collected stuffed animals and dotted her Is with tiny hearts: .

(No, Claudia told her date. I don’t want to find him.)

In the spring of 1971, abortion was still illegal in Maine. If Claudia had been conceived a year later, would she even be here? She had never asked her mother that question. The answer was none of her business, and anyway, she didn’t want to know.

The man, whoever he was, eventually moved away, with his wife and other children, to North or South Carolina. Probably he did it to get away from Deb, who didn’t take betrayal lightly and, Claudia strongly suspected, had made a nuisance of herself.