The Impossible Knife of Memory(66)

“Do you yell at all the new kids like this?”

“You haven’t turned in homework for almost two weeks. Before that, your effort was sporadic at best.”

“I do the interesting assignments. It’s not my fault that most of them are boring.”

“Colleges will scrutinize your grades this year, especially because you’re not a traditional student. You have to step up to the plate, get in the game.”

“Baseball metaphors don’t work with me.”

“Damn it, Hayley!” She pounded the armrest. “Quit screwing around. This is your future.”

“The present can’t be the future, Ms. Benedetti. It can only be the present.”

“What are you so afraid of?” she asked.

“Do you get a bonus for every college application we file? Is there a quota you have to meet?”

Benedetti paused, licked her lips, then continued like I hadn’t said a word. “I’d like to see a list of the colleges that you’re interested in by Monday.”

“What if I don’t want to go to college? What if I don’t know what I want to do? I don’t even know how to think about it.”

The doors opened and students streamed in, led by an English teacher.

“Hope this is okay,” he called to us. “I want to show them how much better Shakespeare is onstage.”

“Good idea,” Benedetti said.

“So we’re done?” I asked, standing.

“One more thing.” She glanced at the class making their slow way to the stage. “The school board had an emergency session last night. They cut a number of extracurriculars.”

“So?”

“They canceled Model United Nations, Latin Club, the Brass Ensemble, and the newspaper. Their revenue projections for this year were way off. That’s why Bill Cleveland wanted to talk to Finn, to break the news to him.”

I shouldered by backpack. “If they really want to save money, they should just shut the whole school down.”





_*_ 68 _*_

And suddenly, it was the tenth of November.

The day before Veterans Day was traditionally the day when the crazy trapped inside my dad chewed its way out of the cage. This time a year earlier, we’d been in a small town outside Billings, Montana. Driving under bridges had started to become a problem so we stayed there a while. Dad got a job working the grill at a diner near the motel where we lived. I hung out in the library and sometimes fished in the small river that ran behind it.

That Sunday, his day off, I caught three tiny trout. I burst through the motel room door to show him. He was deep into a whiskey bottle, watching the 49ers play Seattle. He mocked me about the size of the fish, slurring his words. I turned to leave, but he told me I couldn’t.

I didn’t want to upset him. I stayed.

I didn’t see the gun until the fourth quarter. (It was a

pistol, a new one.)

In the last second of the game, the refs blew the call that would have given Seattle the winning touchdown. Dad exploded, throwing his glass across the room, leaping to his feet, and yelling at the screen. As the official review dragged on, he acted like they were doing it on purpose just to piss him off. He cursed, his face red and sweaty. He stomped his boots on the floor. I wanted to tell him it was only a game and we didn’t like either team, anyway, but I didn’t open my mouth because I didn’t want him screaming at me. The station went to commercial. He paced—back and forth, back and forth—muttering things that didn’t make any sense, almost like he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

The commercials ended. The camera focused in tight on the ref. Dad sat at the end of the bed.

“The ruling on the field stands,” announced the ref.

He never got a chance to declare the game over because Dad grabbed the pistol and shot the television in the guts. Then he picked it up and heaved it against the wall and sent a table lamp flying after it. I sat, paralyzed, while he raged, until finally he slid down the wall, crying, his right hand a bleeding mess.

I wrapped a towel around his hand and packed our stuff in the truck. By the time I was done he’d pulled himself together enough to drive, which was good because we needed to get out of there fast. After a while, he made me drive, telling me when to push on the clutch and shifting the gears with his left hand.

We found a town with an urgent care center that took his insurance. The doctor who stitched Dad up was a Seattle fan whose brother was shot in the Korengal Valley. He understood everything. He prescribed a new pill (the seventh new pill? the eighth?) that he promised would mummify Dad’s memories and keep the crazy in its cage, even when Veterans Day approached or the moon was full.

Dad never filled the prescription.

That morning, I was tired and angry and late. The only cereal left in the cupboard had been purchased by Trish and was “healthy,” which was another word for “tasteless.” My clothes all looked like they’d been bought at Goodwill and my hair lay flat on my head like a dead jellyfish drying in the sun. Dad knocked on my door, said something about how he wasn’t going to work. My head was in the closet, trying to find something to wear that didn’t make me look like a refugee.

I wasn’t thinking about the date.

A few minutes later, Dad knocked again and asked if he could come in and I grunted and he opened the door.