Orphan Train(40)

“SO HOW’S THAT COMMUNITY SERVICE WORKING OUT?” RALPH asks at dinner, pouring himself a big glass of milk.

“It’s all right,” Molly says. “The woman is really old. She has a lot of stuff.”

“Fifty hours’ worth?” Dina asks.

“I don’t know. But I guess there are other things I can do if I finish cleaning out boxes. The house is huge.”

“Yeah, I’ve done some work over there. Old pipes,” Ralph says. “Have you met Terry? The housekeeper?”

Molly nods. “Actually, she’s Jack’s mother.”

Dina perks up. “Wait a minute. Terry Gallant? I went to high school with her! I didn’t know Jack was her kid.”

“Yep,” Molly says.

Waving a chunk of hot dog around on her fork, Dina says, “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

Molly gives Ralph a what the fuck? look, but he just gazes placidly back.

“It’s sad what happens to people, y’know?” Dina says, shaking her head. “Terry Gallant used to be Miss Popular. Homecoming Queen and all that. Then she got knocked up by some Mexican scrub—and now look at her, she’s a maid.”

“Actually, he was Dominican,” Molly mumbles.

“Whatever. Those illegals are all the same, aren’t they?”

Deep breath, stay cool, get through dinner. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

“Hey, now, ladies, that’s enough.” Ralph is smiling, but it’s a worried grimace; he knows Molly is pissed. He’s always making excuses—“She didn’t mean nothing by it,” “She’s yanking your chain”—when Dina does things like intone “the Tribe has spoken” when Molly expresses an opinion. “You need to stop taking yourself so seriously, little girl,” Dina said when Molly asked her to knock it off. “If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re going to have a very hard life.”

So Molly moves her mouth muscles into a smile, picks up her plate, thanks Dina for dinner. She says she’s got a lot of homework, and Ralph says he’ll clean up the kitchen. Dina says it’s time for some trash TV.

“Housewives of Spruce Harbor,” Ralph says. “When are we going to see that?”

“Maybe Terry Gallant could be in it. Show that yearbook photo of her in her tiara, cut to her washing floors.” Dina cackles. “I’d watch that one for sure!”





Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011


For the past few weeks in Molly’s American History class they’ve been studying the Wabanaki Indians, a confederacy of five Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Penobscot, that live near the North Atlantic coast. Maine, Mr. Reed tells them, is the only state in the nation that requires schools to teach Native American culture and history. They’ve read Native narratives and contrasting contemporaneous viewpoints and taken a field trip to The Abbe, the Indian museum in Bar Harbor, and now they have to do a research report on the subject worth a third of their final grade.

For this assignment they’re supposed to focus on a concept called “portaging.” In the old days the Wabanakis had to carry their canoes and everything else they possessed across land from one water body to the next, so they had to think carefully about what to keep and what to discard. They learned to travel light. Mr. Reed tells students they have to interview someone—a mother or father or grandparent—about their own portages, the moments in their lives when they’ve had to take a journey, literal or metaphorical. They’ll use tape recorders and conduct what he calls “oral histories,” asking the person questions, transcribing the answers, and putting it together in chronological order as a narrative. The questions on the assignment sheet are: What did you choose to bring with you to the next place? What did you leave behind? What insights did you gain about what’s important?

Molly’s kind of into the idea of the project, but she doesn’t want to interview Ralph or—God forbid—Dina.

Jack? Too young.

Terry? She’d never agree to it.

The social worker, Lori? Ick, no.

So that leaves Vivian. Molly has gleaned some things about her—that she’s adopted, that she grew up in the Midwest and inherited the family business from her well-off parents, that she and her husband expanded it and eventually sold it for the kind of profit that allowed them to retire to a mansion in Maine. Most of all, that she’s really, really old. Maybe it’ll be a stretch to find drama in Vivian’s portage—a happy, stable life does not an interesting story make, right? But even the rich have their problems, or so Molly’s heard. It will be her task to extract them. If, that is, she can convince Vivian to talk to her.


MOLLY’S OWN CHILDHOOD MEMORIES ARE SCANT AND PARTIAL. SHE remembers that the TV in the living room seemed to be on all the time and that the trailer smelled of cigarette smoke and the cat’s litterbox and mildew. She remembers her mother lying on the couch chain-smoking with the shades drawn before she left for her job at the Mini-Mart. She remembers foraging for food—cold hot dogs and toast—when her mother wasn’t home, and sometimes when she was. She remembers the giant puddle of melting snow just outside the door of the trailer, so large that she had to jump across it from the top step to get to dry ground.